Intellectual property control for maps and geographic data

For millennia, knowledge about the Earth has been organized, presented, and described through maps. The verbal, textual, and graphical information used in creating maps has always been a valuable commodity. Many approaches for protecting the intellectual property of maps have developed as a direct outgrowth of marketing and commerce opportunities, particularly during the exploration and colonization of distant lands by European powers (Pedley, 2005). This dissertation explores that history, with an emphasis on ways that artificial artifacts---cartographic traps---have been used on paper maps as a means of identification and intellectual property control. Cartographic traps are effective because they are hard to detect and remove.; The National Research Council (2000) predicted that intellectual protection for new digital media (such as digital maps) would follow an evolutionary process where data producers, data vendors, and data holders experiment with several competing technologies and means for controlling intellectual property. A case study of geospatial data organizations is presented to document the techniques, problems, and concerns associated with intellectual property control of maps and digital geospatial data. This case study shows a growing interest in the evolving intellectual property protection process and significant ideological differences with respect to licensing and sharing geospatial data.; Maps are now stored primarily in digital format. This thesis looks at the cartographic trap on printed maps, and explores how similar concepts could be instituted with digital geospatial data. Vector geospatial data are often stored as coordinates using double precision variables (64 bits), which can define position on globe to the micron level (10-6 meters). Many of the 64 bits are not used for defining position but are simply an artifact of computer programming This dissertation contains a survey of vector geospatial coordinate storage formats and an experiment to determine the changes to vector coordinate data through a series of repetitive cartographic projection transformations. Another experiment looks at simple strategies for embedding an identifier in vector coordinate digits, and tests the degradation of the identifier through the repetitive projection transformations, some of which succeed and others of which fail. The results are discussed in relation to other current research.