Discussion: Map/terrain/venue ownership and sharing.

Are there any instances out there of more than one club having a map of the same venue? Or multiple clubs who co-own maps? Or arrangements between a club who is hosting an event and the club who owns the map?

What if one club has an old map of a venue, and other club wanted to make a brand new map of it. Are there any issues here?

EMPO directed a Billygoat at Mt Norwottuck in MA in the late '90's. It's a NEOC map. I think we paid NEOC a small fee per map.

SVO has had several Stumbles held on DVOA and QOC maps, where we buy the maps from the club that owns them.

NEOC and CSU have each hosted a number of events on each other's maps, I think (they also have a lot of membership overlap). There have been several Billygoats hosted by clubs on a different club's map, in addition to the one that Janet mentioned.

BAOC under the direction of our mapping director Bob Cooley have produced and essentially donated several maps to the Gold Country Orienteers. We have considered GCO our little sister and have tried to support when we could.

What if one club has an old map of a venue, and other club wanted to make a brand new map of it. Are there any issues here?
Yes. Then it often comes down to personalities. The Governing Body often doesn't cater for that situation and will support the status quo (the old club who "owns" the map and hasn't or can't update it).

Don't let the existence of an old map hinder your progress in making a new map. The old map probably has errors. Starting fresh will produce a better map. And, possession of an old map does not infer any rights to use the venue.

Possesion of a new map does not confer any rights to use the venue either. Only the landowner/manager can do that.

If you don't use the old map as a source in any way then there would not be any infringement of the other club's copyright, so your only issue would be personalities, as O-ing pointed out (e.g. other club's members boycotting your events there because they are petty idiots). If you want to use their map as a base, then you'd have to work out copyright issues with them.

We did lose access to a venue because some other organization (possibly an adventure race?) did not follow the ranger's instructions on out-of-bounds areas and had people running through sensitive nesting areas. So the park just stopped giving off-trail permits. Don't know what map they used, but pretty sure it wasn't ours.

I made a map of Rutgers Environmental Preserve, somewhere between DVOAland and HVOland. It wasn't any use to me when I came back to Scotland, but I didn't know whether to give it to HVO or DVOA. So I sort-of thought I kept the copyright myself (not being a lawyer, probably not), but I'm delighted to see it being used and updated.

It's even nice, by mid New Jersey standards!

Get Lost!! has been updating the Golden Gate Park map to ISSOM, but we gave the copyright to BAOC since we used the original ISOM-ish map as a base.

To ask a rather blunt question...does anyone actually care about the copyright? Charging for copies of it...yeah ok, I can see the case even though I don't like it and hate asking for money for our maps. You have to recoup the cost of making the damn thing, after all.

But...if you find someone with an Unauthorised Copy™ of a map, assuming you can even prove it, do you actually go chasing after them with an axe and a spare lawyer or two? Or does everyone just frown at each other and not send christmas cards?

There is at least one person in the American O community who cares very much about copyright. Specifically, about posting copyrighted maps on the internet. I received lawyerly threats. So, n=1, at least, but it doesn't seem that n is much bigger than that.

Copyright is a bit of a different issue, but there would be many individuals and a few organisations who would take a dim view of others using their work without payment or accreditation. There are many many examples of certain organisations using copies of black and white copies of copies of an original colour O map for events years after the original was out of date. That is no good for the "orienteering" brand. Its often the case that the culprits are actually the land holders, so they have at least some claim. But of course no credit or funds go back to the orienteering community to do the remap.
Intellectual property is another aspect. The easiest way to "prove" ownership of the concept/original is to include one or several deliberate mistakes.

If the map was made in the USA and the relevant USGS topo was used as base, where would the copyright go? I would think the person who updated or made a better map gets the copyright, but as USGS maps are free for everyones use (unlike the british OS maps...making you pay...) , would it be free use?

Public domain is not the same as Creative Commons. If you use public-domain data, you need not put the product into public domain.

Then that's answered.

There is at least one person in the American O community who cares very much about copyright. Specifically, about posting copyrighted maps on the internet.

Would use of the maps in Routegadget count?

The person in question is an attorney in the intellectual property field, and, in my opinion, also has in recent years had some pretty serious... "issues".

Around here I can see views changing over time. From a proprietorial view in the past, to one that enabled us to run a championship on another club's map without payment. The view was that orienteering benefits, so here's the file. It may have been easier that this map was not a paid-for one, it was made by volunteers.

Another example is the sharing of base material; we have geo-referenced rogaine mapping over a large area, our neighbour has detailed but wonky orienteering maps of areas within that. We provide our geometrical framework to them, their maps alert us to new tracks etc.

The new generation has a completely different attitude to IP issues. Take music and software. Kim Dotcom has become a sort of folk hero here, only partly due to our "keystone cops". Here's a question: does every OCAD user own a license?

I think that orienteering would wonderfully benefit if well connected professional organizers were to create memorable, well promoted, well attended events using detailed maps by orienteering clubs. This is exactly the scenario many orienteering clubs fear, and go to great lengths to prevent.

I agree with Vlad that successful professional event organizers holding orienteering events would benefit orienteering as a whole but I can also understand why existing clubs wouldn't necessarily see their interests as well aligned with those of private organizers, for a number of reasons:

- will professional events take participants away from club events?
- will parks be willing to allow the same freqency of club events as have historically taken place plus professionally organized events?
- if the professional organizer pisses of a park's managers somehow, will they become less welcoming to that organizer in particular, to them plus other professional event organizers, or to orienteering in general?
- will the professionals achieve an acceptable technical orienteering standard in their events? If we're talking about Vlad or Rex Winterbottom, this isn't something I'd worry about much. If someone else with no track record and not much of a profile in the existing orienteering community wanted to get into the business of organizing orienteering events, then I wouldn't necessarily have confidence that they wouldn't give orienteering a bad name. As a club president, I have enough worries doing my best to not give orienteering a bad name with the events over which I have some control.

I'm not necessarily talking about professional organizers putting on orienteering events that conform to IOF Rules or Orienteering USA Rules. Classic seven-course orienteering events have the most appeal to club base; but they also are the hardest to put on in terms of competency and manpower, are the most complicated in format to explain to newcomers, lack in terms of social enjoyment, and present these newcomers with a pretty high threshold to overcome in order to get hooked. Yet there is large resistance among the base to try something new—because the base is happy with the product it now has, and perhaps rightfully views alternative takes as bastardized and inferior.

And so if you are an enterprising organizer who has the whole promotion thing down and is competent enough to have worked with the landowners not to drive yourself out of business after a couple of years, what's your biggest obstacle on the way to offer navigation-based events? It's the lack of maps. Your options are to go with something indeed inferior and bastardized, like 100% of adventure race organizers and flip-the-fish do; or to order your own survey, which is expensive and hard and in most cases will duplicate the excellent work the orienteering club has already done. Or you could perhaps collaborate with the orienteering club, buying the right to use their maps?

But the orienteering club isn't really interested in working with you simply because your potential product isn't going to serve the base as well as seven-course events. In other cases the petty element comes into play, as a poster above has noted. And so the march towards irrelevance continues.

On another note, on the West Coast we aren't facing the frequency-of-use problem in close to the same way as Jon envisions. We have a lot of parks! and some of them are very large! All local adventure race event operators have folded, the orienteering club is using perhaps half of its available venues because of the lack of volunteers, and for each given park and every given year there will be 2 to 8 organized trail runs and, for very few that would allow one, a mudder... this use hardly comes close to the quota for organized events.

If you were in our neck of the woods, Vlad, I'd be happy to let you buy the right to use QOC maps for any style of navigational event you could obtain permission for. Don't plan to move just yet though - I have form when it comes to being unable to persuade the rest of QOC that things that seem like good ideas to me actually are good ideas. Not invariably but more than often enough since acceding to the presidency to recognize that I can't mold the club like clay to conform to my vision of the way things ought to be.

Southern Ontario seems to be different in this respect. We have five orienteering clubs (six, until recently) operating within a 90-minute drive of one another. Clubs tend to make and own the maps in their own HQ city, but there is no geographic pattern beyond that. Clubs own maps all over the place.

Ontario clubs are usually good about sharing their maps with other O clubs - and even adventure race organizers - who wish to host events. Some clubs charge a small licensing fee ($1-2) per map to help recover the cost of mapping. Other clubs allow their maps to be used by other O clubs for free as long as their club name is printed on the map.

We don't have as much publicly available mapping data as the U.S. so it is expensive to make maps, and clubs are rightfully protective of them. The tradition here is that a club claims the right to an area - not just to the map. Although cooperation is the norm, some serious inter-club conflicts have arisen from map/area ownership issues in the past. Examples:

- A club claiming a long list of areas for future mapping, thus preventing other clubs from mapping them, but not actually making the maps.
- Two clubs making independent maps of the same forest because each felt they had claimed the area.
- A club updating and using an old map belonging to another club without obtaining permission

A few years ago, the board of Orienteering Ontario developed a Map Registry to address these issues:

- Clubs register the maps they own.

- Clubs register the areas they plan to map over the next two years. A progress report is due after one year. If an Incomplete map is not registered as Complete after two years, the club can seek approval for a one-year extension. Otherwise, that area becomes available for another club to map. That other club would then need to register their intent to map the area over the next two years.

- If two orienteers from different clubs submit concerns to Orienteering Ontario regarding a poor quality map, the mapping subgroup may change it to Incomplete status where the 2-year completion time limit comes into effect.

- If a suitable area mapped for O has not been used for 7 years, any interested club can negotiate with the owner club regarding remapping and assuming its ownership as an Incomplete map. The original owner is not required to negotiate but the map could be designated Incomplete anyway due to poor quality, so they could lose their rights to the area if they do not either update it themselves or cooperate with the club offering to update the map.

A Mapping Appeals Board would review any conflicts that could not be resolved between clubs. It has never reached that point. But let's just say things didn't always go well before the Map Registry was created! :)

"Claiming" an area... that's bordering on lunacy. Actually, it is lunacy. Does Google own the world?

Mapping Appeals Board! That's sad. But I can recognise the feelings that may have led to that. We used to be protective, other clubs used to be protective. Now I think it's just a matter of courtesy to ask clubs with a previous interest in an area.

As someone who has only spent 10 years in the O world, I don't fully understand the history and intense feelings that led to the few conflicts that occurred, but I witnessed how much these things mattered to a small number of key volunteers, and I respect that those feelings were real and had serious consequences. Now that the policies have been written down and a conflict resolution process implemented, naturally we have needed almost none of that stuff - which is just how we wanted it! :)

The Map Registry itself is a good thing. Now that the maps and locations have been collected from all the clubs, Orienteering Ontario is working on a map to show the locations of Southern Ontario maps. In areas where only one club is active, this sort of thing would likely have been done a long time ago, but until the past few years, Orienteering Ontario didn't have info on the maps owned by the various clubs.

T/D, I don't know how the tradition developed of claiming an area; that was before my time. I assume that with limited mapping resources, there was an understanding that if Club A was planning to map Park X, then Club B would map Park Y instead, rather than duplicating effort - and that makes sense. Because we have five clubs in a small area, we all attend each other's meets so it doesn't matter too much to the average participant which club made which map. Any good quality map in our area benefits the entire O community.

The process described by Bash above is along the lines of how things are done in Sweden. I´m not actively involved in mapping today, but at least there was a similar approach earlier.

I suppose the words "claiming" and "appeals board" may sound harsh to many but it´s more a matter of the regional board trying to keep track of what is done where and by whom than forcing rules and regulations upon each and everyone.

It makes sense to come to an agreement and decide who will map what park or forest so the efforts are not wasted - which in the end, as stated above, benefits the entire O community

I think we use similar approach:
http://www.ssl.fi/ssl/sslwww.nsf/sp2?open&cid=cont...

Probably some good orienteering on the Senkaku Islands.

so the efforts are not wasted

What's wrong with putting the product of your work in quasi-Creative Commons or quasi-public domain? If your club is jealous that someone else will be able to make a ton of money with the map you made, well, there's the skill reqiured to put on a good event—it's a lot more more than is required to make a good map. If someone else is really making like a bandit, talk to them—they may be inclined to compensate you, people aren't completely devoid of conscience in this world.

This talk of claiming territory sadly reminds me of gang turf wars, similar in more than one aspect—unless you are somehow related to the gang, you could probably go through "their" (actually public) territory every day and wouldn't ever know "whose" territory it is, since "events" are infrequent and under the radar (fortunately so for the gangs). I hope navigation-sports people are a bit better than that.

This talk of claiming territory sadly reminds me of gang turf wars...

I'm imagining a West Side Story type street fight, with pajamas v. tights (NEOC v. CSU???). And singing.

singing?
http://www.attackpoint.org/viewlog.jsp/user_470/pe...

What's wrong with putting the product of your work in quasi-Creative Commons or quasi-public domain?

There´s nothing wrong with this approach really. I actually have a friend in my club who has done just that!

My take on this is that it´s not necessarily about money (yes, I know it costs a lot of money to make maps in some cases) - my remark about "efforts wasted" is more about practical matters. Wouldn´t it be better for the whole O (and AR) community if we got two maps of two different areas than two maps of the same area (with different pricing according to open market rules)?

Agreed, Bubo - I think that's how this concept began. To be precise, the verb used in the mapping policy is "register" an area for mapping, which sounds less harsh. As long as those maps get made - and with decent quality, no club has ever shown concerns about who registers what. We all get to orienteer on all the maps.

The "Mapping Registration Appeals Board" is the name used in the policy but it remains a theoretical concept since it has not been needed yet. The most serious disagreements in recent years (mostly pre-policy) have been triggered when orienteers involved in mapping changed clubs, creating confusion about map ownership - confusion that no longer exists with the Map Registry. I should stress that on a day-to-day basis, there is tremendous cooperation between these five clubs that share a small region. This is mostly a "good fences make good neighbours" situation!

singing?

While I am not entirely surprised that there was a link to something in my log from this thread, I am surprised that it was to that.