|
|
| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
| |
| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: [gislist] GIS Data Licensing |
| Date: |
08/27/2003 01:50:01 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
|
|
>
> Our City is researching how to sell/distribute our GIS data to data
> resellers. Currently, our GIS data license agreement prohibits
> someone from
> acquiring our data and redistributing or selling it to others. The City
One way to enforce that is to use the GNU "copyleft" provision. That allows
people to create new products based on your data (such as, by adding
improvements) so long as they pass on the right to each of their recipients
to do likewise.
> Attorney would like to see the City collect an annual royalty fee
> based on
> the resell of our GIS products. Has this topic been addressed or
> considered
> by anyone else on the list?
>
I'd advise having the overall decision makers in your community reach that
decision, not the city attorney. Whatever you are likely to collect in the
way of royalties will be greatly exceeded by the costs to your community
(both citizens and city government) of not having widespread, free access to
the GIS data you have for your community. For example, people are more
likely to do productive development or to steward environmental resources if
they can call upon the power of GIS to help them do so.
It's no accident that the US is far in the lead with GIS products and the
use of GIS to benefit society. The widespread, free availability of very
rich GIS data in the US has fostered the creation of a vast array of GIS
products and very widespread usage of GIS. People and organizations in both
the private and public sectors in the US use GIS every data to optimize
their activities. In Europe, where state cartographic monopolies are the
norm and data is very difficult to obtain and expensive, there is much lower
utilization of GIS, to society's detriment.
It is somewhat like the situation in many toll roads (turnpikes) and toll
plazas on bridges: the money collected by the tolls is often barely enough
to offset the cost of the bureaucracy that collects it with very little left
over to go to the supposed funding beneficiary (maintenance on the road or
bridge). If you add to that the phenomenally high cost to society of
wasting billions of man-hours for people waiting in line at a toll plaza and
billions of gallons of gasoline wasted when both people and gasoline could
be doing productive things, it's clear that the tolls collected are
financial losers from a net societal perspective. They're popular because
the economic damage they do is spread out over many small pin-pricks while
the economic gain is concentrated within an entrenched, unified
constituency. It appears to be "money for nothing" to finance a bridge or a
road without accounting for the net damage caused by such tolls.
So, before your community decides to allow the city attorney to invent
another net financial loser, I'd recommend some serious review of the costs
and benefits by the community's decision-makers. There may be something of
a conflict of interest here, since of course if a city GIS department can
fund itself through sales of data there is an organizational incentive to
take the money and run, because arguing the altruistic case (funding the GIS
department for the general good of the community) is too politically
difficult to accomplish.
Cheers,
Dimitri
_______________________________________________
gislist mailing list
gislist@lists.geocomm.com
http://lists.geocomm.com/mailman/listinfo/gislist
_________________________________
This list is brought to you by
The GeoCommunity
http://www.geocomm.com/
Get Access to the latest GIS & Geospatial Industry RFPs and bids
http://www.geobids.com
|
|
Sponsored by:
For information
regarding
advertising rates
Click Here!
|
