[geo-discuss] Re: Fwd: [ordnancemaps] Soviet Military Maps of UK

[Chris Lightfoot]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 05:39:41PM -0300, Daniel Haran wrote:
> I just filed a FOIA request to get the electoral boundaries for my
> city (Halifax, NS, Canada) because our local planning office would not
> (could not?) give me shapefiles. That said, I was free to create my
> own shapefiles from the publicly available PDFs, as well as the legal
> descriptions.
> 
> The notion that it would not be possible to create your own shapefiles
> without infringing some copyright is utterly appalling. If this is
> indeed the case, it calls for some civil disobedience. Would they dare
> arrest you for wearing a t-shirt with your electoral district map on
> it?

Well, realistically they're not going to stop you from
wearing a T-shirt. But yes, it's very unfortunate that the
data are closed in this way. As I say, there may be a way
to bootstrap this without infringing anybody's copyright,
but I can't see how....

-- 
``Being powerful is like being a lady.
  If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.'' (Margaret Thatcher)