OpenStreetMap
British Library and old maps of Ireland
Posted by amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️⚧️ on 2 September 2011 in English.So, once again I'm trying to track down old maps of Ireland from the 19th centuary. They are still relevant to mapping in Ireland and would be a great benefit to OSM in Ireland.
The British Library has copies (You can see if you search their catalog for "[Townland Survey of the County of] Dublin. Surveyed in 1836-37. Corrected to 1843. Scale, six inches to one statute mile." ). I'm contacting them to find out about getting copies, prices, copyright status etc.
Has anyone talked to the British Library before about OSM? Has anyone traced anything from some maps that came from the British Library? Are they aware of OSM?
Discussion
Comment from z-dude on 3 September 2011 at 06:30
maps from the 19th century would be out of copyright.
The benefits is that you can also map ruins for places which are no longer there, and add historical names.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️⚧️ on 3 September 2011 at 12:02
The original pages published in the 19th century would be out of copyright. There are 2,000 A1 pages. Some places have scanning in the pages and now have digital copies. Some places that have done that claim copyright on the scanned images. It is not clear that scanning legeally gives them copyright, however I don't want to have to go up against the lawyers from the British Library. It would be much easier if they admitted that they legeally aren't claiming copyright.
Comment from Sanderd17 on 3 September 2011 at 16:24
I have used scanned maps from 1830 of Belgium. They were great for drawing city borders since the majority of those borders hasn't changed during that time, and there is no way to map it with other methods.
Scanning gives them copyright on the image, but not on the data. So you can't spread the image, but you can derive data from it without problems.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️⚧️ on 5 September 2011 at 09:06
The British Library have replied. Aswell as the high cost of the images (~ £20,000 for email copies of the whole lot), they are also claiming copyright on them, and not allowing the open sharing of information. I don't know if it's legal, but it's certainly not totally clean to import into OSM.
Here's what they say:
> The maps are out of copyright but you cannot reproduce any images
> we supply you with without permission from the British Library.
Comment from chriscf on 13 September 2011 at 16:00
They can say whatever they like - the maps are out of copyright, and "slavish reproduction" lacks originality. Unless they've gone to the trouble of rectifying them for you, or have restored them to such a degree that they could be argued to not be the same map, you don't need their permission to use what they don't hold exclusive rights to. The point made in the US in Bridgeman v. Corel was affirmed (albeit because it didn't apply) in the UK in Antiquesportfolio v. Fitch. Unfortunately for them, simply saying "you need our permission" doesn't magically make it so. The National Portrait Gallery tried a similar stunt with Wikipedia - and it backfired badly.