On Saturday, March 19, 2005 8:07 AM, Rick <giantsrick13(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
--- "James D. Forrester"
<james(a)jdforrester.org> wrote:
On Friday, March 18, 2005 7:56 PM, Rick
<giantsrick13(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
How can a red dot on an otherwise blank map of
British
Columbia with the county lines listed, possibly be
copyrighted?
One imagines that the contention is that the source blank map is in
fact held in copyright.
How is a blank map with the outlines of the counties
copyrighted? Any more than a list of counties would
be copyrightable.
The former is a work of art (there is always going to be some imprecision in
the drawing of a map vs. the original actual borders as seen on the Earth
from a height which might serve to cause the map's creation to be seen as
sufficiently intelligent as to warrant copyright status, notwithstanding the
selection of transformation to map from an ablate sphere to a plane, itself
(the selection, not the mechanical transformation, of course) arguably a
concious design creation.
Case in point: in the UK, the Ordanance Survey (governmental agency) and the
AA (car rescue service) both make maps independently; they alter these maps
by adding small deviances (bends in borders, squiggles in rivers, et al.) so
that copiers are detectable, but it is the copying of the map itself, not
the inclusion of their random squiggles. BICBW.
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
Mail: james(a)jdforrester.org | jon(a)eh.org | csvla(a)dcs.warwick.ac.uk
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