So and where are IP rights of the still living former Soviet topographers? Is Mapstor paying royalty to specialists still operating at the 5th Cartography Enterprise in Minsk?
British have been pirates for ages. Old habits never die.
Presumably if there were any IP rights at all (what with it being a Communist state), they were assigned to the USSR government or, like products of the US government, are born into the public ___domain.
Copyright of USSR-made works is not public ___domain; tracing the owner is tricky at times, but [obviously] works where the copyright inheritor is hard to trace are pretty much the opposite of public ___domain - you're not allowed to copy w/o permission, even if that permission is tricky to obtain.
The "made by gov't -> public ___domain" is an USA-specific detail that doesn't apply in most other places.
If specific people owned the copyright, then it's as usual for any other works; if a specific USSR institution owned the copyright, then the ownership will be determined by the early 1990ies transition/reorganization laws and contracts; if 'USSR' owned it, then it's owned by Russia afterwards, not public ___domain.
What? The USSR was one of the creators of the framework IP protection conventions. Russia is legal successor of the USSR and paid its foreign debts by the way. So what Mapstor does is plain ripping off Russian IP, since maps in question were produced after 1971.
UPD: and Belarusian IP rights too. To be exact - legal department of the 5th Cartography Enterprise must file DMCA complaint agaist Mapstor and alike in such a situation.
Please do not think you can violate IP property of the USSR. otherwise, your own heir will feel uneasy when such best ripping practices will be applied to them. Inherited property is still a property, isn't it?
So, then it was exactly as I said: it's either the government or the public's - not the original mapmakers like your mother-in-law. In pretty much no circumstance will the copyright on military maps ever belong to the original person who made them; such things are almost always going to be for-hire works. (Why on earth would any government or organization hire people for the extremely expensive and laborious work of making global maps and give the copyright to them?)
If the governments still care, let them deal with it. It's no business of yours, nor do you need to white-knight on their behalf and throw in irrelevant arguments & gratuitious nationalist slurs.
Looks like you know little about copyright law and how it applies. Very strange, you protect clear violators. Guys bought maps illegally, illegally exported classified material and are trading(!) classified information. Please, let me decide what is my business and what is not, thank you very much.
IANAL, but my understanding is that all (with a few caveats) works created by US government employees are, in fact, in the public ___domain but that doesn't mean they can be made available publicly without restriction.
The fact that U.S. Government works are not protected under the U.S. Copyright Law does not create a requirement that all U.S. Government works be made publicly available without restriction (See Gellman, Robert M. Twin Evils: Government Copyright and Copyright-like Controls Over Government Information. Syracuse Law Review, 999, 1995. ADA394923). See Pfeiffer v. Central Intelligence Agency 62, 60 F.3d 861 (D.C. Cir. 1995). Federal laws and agency policies govern the public release of U.S. Government information. Examples include Executive Order 13292, Classified National Security Information , OMB Circular A-130,63 Management of Federal Information Resources, Department of Defense Directive 5230.9 Clearance of DoD Information for Public Release, April 9, 1996, ASD (PA) and DOD Instruction 5230.29 Security and Policy Review of DoD Information for Public Release.
You seem to be very aggressive and politicized on this topic (why did you throw in that totally gratuitous aside about the British always being pirates?). You might want to consider your comments more carefully.
Well, copyright would protect only making new copies and redistributing them, but it definitely is legal to resell the physical maps that were made by, e.g., 5th Cartography Enterprise in 1980ies, distributed throughout USSR in rather large quantities (the access was controlled, but there were many of those maps made) and then inherited by various ex-USSR countries and enterprises.
No royalty or permission is required when [re]selling existing copies of copyrighted works, copyright protects only making copies.
With exception to scales better than 1:50000 maps, I am afraid these are again classified in Russia. And there are these famous regulations applied - http://goo.gl/OF5bSn . Basically everything that has relief from 1:50000 is classified. However you can still have 1:20000 electronic relief of Russia from torrents, if you don't legally care.
