Interactive Birthright Map application - copyright issues ?

[dinadan]

Hi,

My name's Alexandre and I've been a fan of Birthright since 1995. I work as a web mapping application developer using OpenSource softwares such as OpenLayers, GeoExt, MapServer, etc.

About two years ago, I contacted Wizard of the Coast with the proposal to freely share an interactive web mapping application I made using the above technologies and paper maps of Faerun I scanned and spatially referenced. The result was a very simple map application that users could pan and zoom pretty much like GoogleMaps and with a basic "overland movement" calculator. That widget was main reason I wanted this application in the beginning: to be able to easily draw a line on the map representing a travel route taken by the players, which gave me the amount of time required to travel depending on the transport used in days and hours.

Now, I'm thinking about doing the same for the new small Birthright campaign I'm about to begin with some local friends. I'd like to create a new version of the application but built on top of Birthright maps.

Sorry for the long story, here are my questions: is it okay if I share my work ? Are the maps copyrighted and wouldn't allow me to share what I'd do ? That's the issue that happened with Wizard of the Coast. They didn't want me to publicly show my application. What about Birthright stuff ?

In brief, I'd do it anyway, but I want to know if I could make my work public. If so, it could lead to a public web site dedicated to the application, plus the source code would be hosted on Github.

Please, let me know how far I can get with this project.

Regards,

Alexandre

[Muaadeeb]

As long as you do not charge for your maps you will be fine. I for one would love to see what you have and how extensible your application would be.

Can you do it for the entire continent?

[Arius Vistoon]

I think you can.

But i know TSR/WoTC/Hasbro don't want give some legal license/authorization for the content of any setting/world until the 5th edition of AD&D come (in 2 years, i think). and i think after, they don't give too.

But in fact, you can use/share it if it's for no-commercial use or no-marketing use and if you don't do "bad" thing under the brand and say you have some no link/agreement with them.

Now, in the case of Birthright, you have an explicite agreement if your work is here, in this "official" website.

May be someone else can answer more better than me because i'm not sure...

[dinadan]

Muaadeeb, Arius Vistoon,

Thanks for your replies.

It would be entirely free and yes it could be as big as the whole continent. I have the original paper maps at home, so it would be fairly easy to scan them in color, in high definition, for a better "zoom-in" rendering.

For the location of the application itself, I'd be glad to see it hosted here. It requires a lot of server-side libraries installed though and I usually use Apache to publish them. I usually work with Linux Ubuntu servers. At start, I'd start be non-officially and freely publishing it on a dev machine I'd entirely control, then I'd need to talk to an admin here to move the application here. It would be quite complex IMHO, but possible.

This is a pretty big project and I'll work on it on my spare times so I expect it to take a while to see a first live version. The first version would show a plain version of the scanned map, but much more would be possible.

If people would be interested, I could load the map in a GIS application such as QuantumGIS, then digitally draw each feature one by one, and give each one informations and attributes. "What ?" I mean I'd use the drawing tool of that GIS app. to create each province, each forests, montains, lakes, etc. then assing 'names, rating, source, terrain_type, etc' attributes. In the web map application, using query tools, one would then be able to click on the map, let's say on Roesone, and get a popup with Roesone summary details in it. It would also be possible to browse the map using a map engine to draw them, which would make the zoom levels infinite.

If anyone would be interested in such features, please tell me so. It would take much more time, but could be doable in a phase 2 or 3 of the project.

I'll let you know when I start.

Kind regards,

Alexandre

[Arius Vistoon]

i'm interested. give us information about your progress.

personnaly, i know and use this for map zoom http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/. and i'm interested about your solution

[dinadan]

Arius,

Thanks for your interest. I created a Github public repository for this. You can follow its progress there.

https://github.com/adube/birthright-map

You can subscribe and click the "watch" button to follow every push new stuff. You'd receive an email.

Regards,

Alexandre

[dinadan]

Hi,

I think I forgot to log in before replying earlier

Anyway, here's the Github repository where I'll put my code : https://github.com/adube/birthright-map

[Arjan]

Hi,

I think I forgot to log in before replying earlier

Anyway, here's the Github repository where I'll put my code : https://github.com/adube/birthright-map

nah you didnt forget, it was put on moderated since you posted a link and didnt have enough posts yet

[AndrewTall]

Which map are you going to use as the base?

The ones in the boxes are all differing scales and have inconsistent layering (i.e. only some of the provinces have the population/source added).

Kay did some maps a while back that were very nice, I'm not sure if they got properly put on the site though - I could email them if you want to see them.

[dinadan]

I used this one : http://community.wizards.com/bright/...ref_tab=photos