Le portail francophone de la géomatique

Avec l'autorisation de Dimitri Rotow, je vous retransmets ses idees (en
anglais), a rapprocher des debats sur le rapport Mandelkern, le livre blanc
de la CE, la mission Lengagne, la these de Xavier Lopez sur l'Information
Geographique aux Etats-Unis et en Europe...

Personnellement, je trouve que le style en est assez hallucinant, et que ce
n'est pas tous les jours que l'on entend un Americain s'exprimer ainsi.
J'ai traduit les phrases qui ont retenu mon attention (et je laisse le
reste du texte dans sa splendeur d'origine). A part ca, les Americains ont
une grande tradition de chicane, et leurs avocats sont specialistes des
vides juridiques et des loopholes in the contract .

J'y rajoute aussi un extrait du magazine Infotecture du 1999-10-26,
concernant le debat international sur l'echange des donnees et produits.

Acces aux donnees publiques : vers une doctrine a deux vitesses ?

[...] En s'interdisant de poser des principes qui s'appliqueraient aussi
aux situations acquises - celles d'organismes comme l'IGN, Meteo-France,
l'INSEE ou l'INPI, le groupe [du conseiller d'Etat Dieudonne] Mandelkern
prend le risque d'une doctrine a deux vitesses, qui ne resoud pas les
problemes aujourd'hui les plus criants.

A bientot,
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Les autoroutes sont financees par l'Etat car les retombees economiques sur
la societe entiere sont positives. L'Information Geographique financee par
l'Etat permet de creer plus de valeur pour la societe que ce qu'elle lui
coute. Les tentatives d'auto-financer les couts de production ont en
realite pour consequence de couter plus que l'argent effectivement percu,
ceci au detriment de l'Etat lui-meme.

Ce n'est pas un hasard si la quasi-totalite des logiciels de SIG vient des
Etats-Unis d'Amerique (les autres acteurs sont marginaux). Pourquoi donc
americains ? Parce qu'il y a beaucoup de sources d'information geographique
gratuites, ce qui permet aux utilisateurs de creer facilement leurs SIG.

La Bourse americaine se developpe par l'informatique et l'internet : les
milliardaires americains deviennent de plus en plus riches. Pendant ce
temps, les riches europeens vont « planquer » leur argent dans des banques
en Suisse ou au Liechtenstein pour acheter des actions de societes
americaines.

L'heure du reveil a sonne pour les Europeens, s'ils ne veulent pas finir
cloisonnes dans une sorte de parc de loisirs culturel a la Disneyland, dans
un monde domine par des Americains ignorants.
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> VMap1 is not free data.

Nonsense. VMAP1 is in the public domain by US law. Saying otherwise is
like that silly thread a while back where people were saying DCW is not in
the public domain. I posted a quotation from the DCW files themselves
stating they are in the public domain, yet still people persisted in saying
it was not in the public domain.

> VMap1 is not 100 % financed by NIMA. It is co-produced by 18 mapping
agencies. In France, the content is copyrighted, as in the UK, Canada,
Germany, etc. Other areas are compiled from several map sources, and some
governments would not like to see their territories unveiled in a
commercial CD.

That's a typically European government outlook. Look, I have no quarrel
with the right of European government cartographic monopolies to limit the
rights of their citizens however their local laws allow. After all, these
are sovereign powers which appear for the most part to enjoy the support of
their citizens. We are all internationalists here at Manifold and do not
make the modern American mistake of thinking all the world's an American
enclave and only US customs should prevail. However, let's not make the
corresponding Old World mistake of thinking that the European powers can
project their laws and attitudes as if the entire world (including the US)
were still divided into European colonies.

It always comes as a surprise to Europeans when they finally realize just
how much the US is bizarrely different from the Old World. Because people
here are mostly white people whose young people dress in jeans just like
the French and German youth, and because there are many outward
similarities based on a shared international monoculture created in
Hollywood, it is easy for Europeans to think that the Americans are somehow
similar in legal outlook. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US
begins with a singularly un-European legal framework and then proceeds to
distort that framework by allowing a rule of politics to bend everything,
including the rule of law, to a series of strange and extremist politically
correct fashions.

Here, for example, we destroy our most important companies and our most
successful exporters as a matter of government policy. It is a crazily
legalistic society without peer, even as the law is unable to protect
citizens from a scale of violent crime unprecedented in the latter half of
the 20th century. I did not write those laws nor did I create this society.
However, it is a mistake to think that the US will ignore its laws because
Europeans find them distasteful or stupid or inconvenient for the
furtherance of anti-democratic state cartographic monopolies. These same
laws apply to VMAP1.

In point of fact, most of VMAP1 originates in US military data collected by
US sensors and processed by US personnel. Every bit of that data set that
is US-origin by US law is in the public domain. Too bad for the UK or the
French if they now face Uncle Sam as a competitor.

It's not accurate (within the meaning of applicable law) to state that 18
mapping agencies coproduced VMAP1. Only NIMA produced VMAP1. At best,
it may be accurate to state that the VMAP1 product was produced in part
using data contributed from 18 mapping agencies. This distinction is
important because there are key firewall laws that affect ownership
rights in anything contributed to Uncle Sam as well as subsequent
redistribution of data sets derived from contributed data.

First and most important, if certain highly specific contractual forms are
not observed, any material used by a public agency enters the public domain.
It doesn't matter if that material is previously private property of an
individual, a company or a sovereign state. If the requisite process is
not followed, it irretrievably enters the public domain. This law is
actually a sensible one that prevents the old-style corrupt maneuver of
benefitting from business with the Feds while preventing the Feds (ie, the
population) from also benefitting. Let's not pretend that the French and
the UK did not benefit from NIMA data as well, so if they went into the
transaction with their eyes closed that's their tough luck.

Second, there is an exclusion from FOIA access for certain map data
provided by a sovereign power under copyright; however, it is *not* legal
for NIMA or anyone else to seed public domain material with foreign
poison-pill data to render it non-public.

Third, once NIMA fails to claim the exemption noted above, it loses the
ability to claim it. NIMA's current legal difficulty with FOIA requests for
VMAP1 is that they failed to claim the exemption in the required time. So,
under the FOIA they lose that exemption. The UK and the French may scream
about this, but then they should be careful in their choice of partners.
If they choose hoodlums who do not follow the law, then they must pay the
price of abuse of relationship as a result. It's a little like loaning a
car to a drug dealer who is later arrested and your car is confiscated.
Tough luck if you didn't know your friend was a drug dealer.... next time
be more careful to whom you loan your car.

Of course, whatever the US courts decide about all this in the territory
they control does not prevent the UK or the French from deciding something
different on their own territory. The problem the UK and the French have
is that unless they try (like the Chinese) to prevent their citizens from
accessing Internet at all, they have great practical difficulty enforcing
government strictures where their citizens are prevented from using what is
considered to be a public good in other societies.

I should point out (not that they care or that it is relevant to the
intellectual property status of VMAP1) that the UK and the French are
proceeding once more into an Old World dead end.  The reason we have
state-funded highways in modern societies is that such highways end up
creating much more value for society than they cost. State GIS data is
like that as well. Attempts to recover costs simply cost more than the
money recovered, and en passent end up killing benefits to the state
itself that are worth far more than the costs.

It's no accident that essentially all the world's GIS software comes from
the US. There are a few players outside the US, but they are quite
insignificant. Why the US? It's because here there is far more free data
with which cool new GIS products can be created. It's also true that
posting free data online results in many more people figuring out how to
work with that data in new ways, so the data becomes much more valuable to
the State. This is a new paradigm coming straight out of Silicon Valley,
so it's not surprising that Old World bureaucracies either in Europe or in
the US (like NIMA and other badly-managed agencies like the Census Bureau)
don't understand it.

It's really funny. The greatest rise in wealth the world has ever seen has
arisen as a result of first the software industry and second its modern
cousin the Internet. These have emerged as almost purely American
phenomena. All Europe stands in wonder, with Eurocrats throughout the
great European peninsula(s) wondering how to raise up their countries into
modern electronic times. Their solution? Control everything from Bonn,
Paris or Brussels, make it illegal to compete with the government, and use
the Internet to kill public access to public data. .. and then they wonder
why the American Internet billionaires keep getting richer and richer. In
the meantime, rich Europeans make the trek to Zurich or Vaduz to ask their
bankers which American company's stock is the right one to buy. Is this
any way to run a continent?

It's time for Europeans to get moving if they don't want to end up like
some cultural disneyland theme park in a world dominated by ignorant
Americans.
Now is the time to adopt the best part of Silicon Valley street smarts.
Tech Tip for Eurocrats: it's *not* about preventing public access to public
data.

Pascal Boulerie