Mapping and copyrights are two topics traditionally connected very strongly together. At least here in good old Europe people act very sensitive when re-publishing third party maps. Reading a couple of posts about Yahoo!’s new MapMixer, I started wondering how they would deal with that issue. On O’Reilly Radar I found an embedded MapMixer map containing a third party overlay clearly indicating “All rights reserved”. So maybe Brady Forrest actually holds the copyright, has the permission to redistribute or just missed the line
… Don’t upload any map or image that you don’t have the right to distribute …
when he uploaded the map below to Yahoo!’s MapMixer (assuming that it was him who added the map).
MapMixer is indeed an interesting service, but it’s really hard to find a copyright-free map. Except the ones available on Wikipedia. At least I couldn’t find any, neither do I own as person the copyrights of a map laying around here.
However, in many cases copyright holders won’t bother. And in many cases the service does make sense, like publishing a detailed campus map embedded in the Yahoo! street map to guide visitors.
But I doubt that most mapping agencies and map publishers will be very happy to see their maps popping up at Yahoo!. For instance, if I’d like to make a thousand black&white paper copies of the Austrian topographic map, I’d have to ask permission to do so. For publishing the same base map as image online, what MapMixer basically offers, one has to license the map for redistribution.
Regarding maps, I’d consider the potential user base for this service as rather low. But luckily MapMixer isn’t limited to maps only, users can upload any possible image and put it on the map. So it’ll be interesting to see what finally comes out.