Say you work in a local authority. Being helpful, you want people to be able to find the public toilets in your area via an online map. So you look on your in-house mapping system for the locations of those toilets (which your council built, maintains and cleans, and whose location you originally fed into the in-house map), and begin feeding their positions on to Google Maps, Microsoft Live and Yahoo's Maps.
According to Ordnance Survey, the government's mapping agency, you've just broken its copyright, because the map you checked is licensed from it. And your council licence, like most OS licences, doesn't allow you to put data derived from an OS map on to the world-visible Google Maps - even though Google's maps are also licensed from OS.
In short, you're not allowed to put data you created (the toilets' locations), and then provided to OS, on to a different map - even though that new map is licensed from OS. You, or the council, could be sued. Last month OS sent a two-page letter reiterating its licensing restrictions, ostensibly as "guidance" to help councils considering using Google Maps. Though it might just seem like a licensing quirk, the re-assertion by OS of its rights is a high-stakes political move whose effects could be far-reaching.
Mapping crime is a crime
First, it will stymie plans to introduce crime mapping by police forces. That would provoke a row between the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, who made a high-profile announcement in July saying that police forces would all offer crime maps by the end of the year, and Iain Wright, the minister in charge of OS at the Department of Communities and Local Government. If Smith's pledge is derailed by OS - which would lead to Smith facing embarrassing questions in Parliament - Wright would have to explain why to her.
OS is unrepentant. "If the police data used ward or boundary data from OS maps, it would be covered by our licence," it says. "There would be a problem if they wanted to put that data on Google maps." But crime data is collected by ward; so the Metropolitan Police crime map uses Google maps and shows those boundaries - clearly breaching the OS licence. (OS confirms this.)
The move also seems to block most of the winners of Cabinet Office's recently completed £80,000 Show Us A Better Way competition to find innovative ways to use government-held data. The winner of that competition, a site called Can I Recycle It?, would rely on locating local recycling centres - which OS could argue has been derived from its maps if a council keeps them with any sort of geographical referencing. The same would be true of another winner, Loofinder, which aims to make locations of public toilets available in a map online, just as described above.
Although OS issued a press release congratulating the competition winners and offering them "full access" to its Google Maps-like OpenSpace system - which has similar programmability - the OpenSpace licence limits the number of viewings allowed per day, and bans any use by business, central or local government. Furthermore, OS claims ownership of any data plotted on an OpenSpace-derived map. And the use of derived data would break its licence with authorities.
This would mean OS has made an enemy of Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister who set up the competition, as well as Michael Wills, the justice minister whose office provided £20,000 of prize funding. That could be costly in political capital at a time when senior government figures are considering whether to force OS to make some of its digital mapping products available for free without copyright restrictions.
Though government-owned, OS functions as an arm's-length trading fund, responsible for its own profit and loss account. It receives no direct government funding, but roughly half of its annual £118m revenues come from local and central government licences; the rest is from the sale of licences to the private sector.
Threat to revenue
Shifting to a free data model would cut OS's licensing revenues - but a study by a team of Cambridge academics earlier this year suggests it would also stimulate the public and private sector. That is the argument the Free Our Data campaign has made since March 2006: that restrictive licensing of government data holds back public and private projects, and that making them available for free would stimulate businesses and generate taxable activity that would more than offset revenues lost from direct licensing.
OS's letter to councils has provoked a furious row: some local authorities now say they will collect data on their own using satellite navigation systems and enter it into the wiki-style OpenStreetMap project to avoid OS.
Still not happy
One council, Surrey Heath, has already started: one employee, James Rutter, commented on the Free Our Data blog that: "OpenStreetmap provides us with a very flexible platform to put 'stuff' on to that we are interested in ... with the added bonus that everyone can benefit from it. Rather than sitting back waiting for things to change regarding OS licensing, we're doing something about it."
Another commenter, Dane Wright of the London borough of Brent, suggested that the long-term solution is to change the Mapping Services Agreement, under which local government in effect bulk-buys licences to OS data. It expires next March - and is being renegotiated now. Wright argues that the agreement should be rewritten to let authorities share data more freely and ensure that basic democratic boundaries such as boroughs, parishes and wards can be freely reproduced without OS licensing issues. Wright added: "The short-term solution is to generate location data for public mapping and reuse using non-OS sources such as OpenStreetMap or Google/Microsoft maps. This is a practical way forward for relatively small volumes of data such as school catchment areas, libraries, public toilets etc, but it obviously requires local authorities to duplicate work. As for the OS OpenSpace API - one can only laugh when reading OS FAQ 6.7, which specifically prohibits its use by local or central government because they are commercial organisations."
Google even changed the terms of its mapping licence last week in an attempt to clarify that it is not claiming ownership of data. But OS said it is still unhappy with the terms and that it is "working with" Google to "redefine" the clauses. OS says: "We don't feel the revised terms and conditions resolves the issue."