Copyright on maps?

[Mouse]

Everyone who reads this post

The more I think about it, the more continuing with Malacandra is just opening a can of worms, and therefore not my cup of tea. I draw maps because I enjoy drawing them - not to get into a whole pile of the proverbial for doing it.

And... we have one cracker of a thunderstorm starting up right here and now, so I'm offline for a while!

[Falconius]

Actually no, if you changed the names they'd have no claim on it at all. It doesn't matter what it's based on if it has no connection, and given that it is a work of your imagination it has no connection. For Naima using existing GoT maps as a base, changing the names wouldn't help.

[Hai-Etlik]

With fictional worlds it's relatively straightforward. The world itself is a creative work and therefore subject to copyright. With the real world, it gets seriously murky as you aren't generally supposed to be able to restrict a fact with copyright, only an expression of a fact. This doesn't stop people from throwing lawsuits around over facts, and it can get fuzzy around the boundary between fact and representation of that fact, particularly with spatial data. In some cases copyright, or something similar to copyright gets extended to databases: collections of facts where the individual facts would be exempt but the collection of them (or derived collections) get restricted.

[Mouse]

Well I've decided to discontinue Malacandra. Mapping isn't any fun at all if anxiety is thrown into the mix, and since I map for fun to get away from all the anxieties I suffer about the real world (I have Asperger's Syndrome - a form of autism), the decision is both obvious and easy from my p.o.v.

If, now that I have contacted them about Malacandra, the CS Lewis Foundation express their wishes about maps based on Lewis's work more generally I will let you know what they are so you don't have to go asking again if you want to go and do a Narnia map, or something. (there are millions of those online)

[selden]

Discussions found on the Web about Malacandra indicate that it's based on maps of Mars originally developed by Percival Lowell. I don't think there'd be any problem if you based some of your own maps on his works. The IAU certainly isn't going to complain if you use official names for locations, either.

Here's a screengrab of my own simplistic effort of displaying Lowell's map projected onto Mars in Celestia. I just now did an image search of the screengrab and discovered that it's being used by a number of Web sites.

plmars2.jpg

My Web page including the map can be seen at https://www.classe.cornell.edu/~seb/...llery-002.html

[ScottDA]

for TGofT Names will be copyrighted !!! and likely also trademarked ( TM is a whole different royal f'ing mess of a can of worms )

a derived map ?

so NO PLACE NAMES
ScottDA

remember Tri Tac games and the old "call of Cthulhu"

Oh, I wasn't suggesting anything of the sort. Just relating my own experiences, which I tried to state clearly were only just that and not legal advice. Sorry if there was any murkiness as to my intentions. I was just trying to join in an interesting conversation.

[Falconius]

...which I tried to state clearly were only just that and not legal advice. Sorry if there was any murkiness as to my intentions. I was just trying to join in an interesting conversation.

I'm pretty sure there is no actual legal advice on this thread And we are all just interested in this conversation.

[Mouse]

Discussions found on the Web about Malacandra indicate that it's based on maps of Mars originally developed by Percival Lowell. I don't think there'd be any problem if you based some of your own maps on his works. The IAU certainly isn't going to complain if you use official names for locations, either.

Here's a screengrab of my own simplistic effort of displaying Lowell's map projected onto Mars in Celestia. I just now did an image search of the screengrab and discovered that it's being used by a number of Web sites.

plmars2.jpg

My Web page including the map can be seen at https://www.classe.cornell.edu/~seb/...llery-002.html

Thank you for researching the situation, Selden. That was very kind of you

I also came across Lowell's canal maps, and was intrigued by them. However, the problem I had was that I was drawing a map that described the landscape of Malacandra through the eyes of Lewis's protagonist, Ransom - a map of Lewis's book 'Out of the Silent Planet' in every sense of the word. After pondering this discussion at length I realised I wasn't enjoying doing it any more, which rather killed my mapping mojo - so I simply drew a line under it and moved on.

[Mouse]

Just to update everyone on the idea of making a map based on CS Lewis's novels. This is the response I got from the CS Lewis Foundation just now:

"...creating the map purely for the competition is fine but to confirm you can not print/publish/distribute/reproduce the map in any form."

The competition in question was the Lite Challenge entry I made (Inspired by Malacandra).

What this means is that I can't upload the map anywhere online even if I did finish it (which I'm not going to now anyway). But this was only what I expected to hear, and probably exactly the same conditions that I would place on others if I had a published novel that someone else decided to draw a map for - especially if I hadn't commissioned that map.

[Straf]

So you can create it for the competition but you can't show it to anyone?