On Saturday, March 19, 2005 8:07 AM, Rick giantsrick13@yahoo.com wrote:
--- "James D. Forrester" james@jdforrester.org wrote:
On Friday, March 18, 2005 7:56 PM, Rick giantsrick13@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,