Hi Natalie, You've asked a very good question. You don;t want to infringe on anyone's copyright, which you'll really appreciate as a published author with your own copyrighted work! I've written numerous hiking and mountain biking guides, and am trying to sell one of my publishers on a paddling book (no, we're not in competition). I've done hundreds of maps, both for my books, and for other authors. You'll have no copyright issues as long as your maps are all your original work, and any other cartography you include is not copyrighted. All maps and charts produced by the federal government- USGS, NOAA, etc, are not copyrighted and are in the public domain. So you could use a USGS topographic map or a federally published marine chart as a background for your own map, for example. All privately produced maps, such as Trails Illustrated, and those put out by state and local governments, are copyrighted, even if there's no copyright notice on the map. This includes computer-based maps such as Maptech marine charts and National Geographic Topo! maps, because they've added their own content to the government maps. You can certainly take field notes on copyrighted maps, and use information from them to construct your own maps (its the presentation that's copyrighted, not the information itself), but you can't incorporate copyrighted maps in your own work without permission. Getting permission is not necessarily difficult or expensive. For example, one of my publishers has blanket permission to use a well-known line of private maps in their books, which means I'm free to use them as an author. I've also gotten permission to use a single reproduction as an example in a book without difficulty, because the copyright owner wanted the free publicity. Good luck on the book. Bruce Flagstaff, AZ mail_at_brucegrubbs.com www.brucegrubbs.com *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Dec 02 2004 - 14:58:32 PST
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