ABSTRACT
Intellectual property rights and associated legal frameworks Broader use of geospatial data in Canada has been hindered in the past due to the restrictive Crown copyright requirements that prevented the redistribution of data. GeoConnections now adopts the policy that instead of preventing data use, licensing and copyright should be used to protect data integrity, essentially building a ‘branding’ to exploit the credibility of the original source data (Sears 2001). This essentially means that users may redistribute datasets as long as the original source is acknowledged and the data is not altered. Such a policy is aimed at maximising data use and the benefits that result.
