[Freegis-list] vmap copyright

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

Hi Benoit,

On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 08:45:17PM +0100, Benoit Véler wrote:
>         All right, I might trust you, but anyway I' would appreciate other 
> opinion, if there are some. The point is important to study, I should 
> think... ;-)

I recommend not to use the ESRI DCW data, because they
are outdated. This might be less visible for the area
of US, but for Europe it definitly is.

ESRIs copyrighting of the data was a legal act.
The US Public Domain status allows this.

The freedom of the VMAPL0 data is not 100% satisfactory
clearified. However, none of the nations other than US
contributing to the datasets is in a situation
where they want or even can sue the free use
of the data. The data have become a good that
is used, sold, modified etc. in many ways worldwide.

Your are therefore safe to use, modify, sell the VMAPL0 data.
(I would prefer to have the improvements protected
by the GPL, of course :-)

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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