Background
Why: A couple of years ago I had a major health scare. Since then, I have considered my mortality somewhat more seriously. As there are not a lot of attorneys with actual GIS production experience, it occurred to me that some of the classes and presentations I’ve been offering for the past ten years ought to be made public before I shuffle off to GIS Heaven (I have come to understand that there is no “Lawyer Heaven”). These are not great works of research, art, or literature. They are just one man’s thoughts and analysis on our weird little Venn Diagram interface between GIS and the law. I hope you find them of some value.
My Process: I have many written documents that are not polished perfectly for the Internet. I could clean each document and then present it when it was perfect, but I don’t think that is the way to go. So I’m essentially dumping things into HTML and after they are made public I am going through and polishing them. In the early days of the Internet you would see a lot of pages that said under construction. That is now generally regarded as a bad practice. So, I’m not gonna put an “under construction graphic” on them. You’ll see that some pages are ALMOST polished and other pages are a flaming hot mess. My thinking is that I’d rather have semi-gibberish pages up on web where others can polish then, if they need them. That is preferable to them remaining on my obscure cloud backup.
Sharing is Caring: If you’ll notice, I have also used a Creative Commons copyright for my educational classes and presentations. Under that authority, I ask that you to give me credit where it’s fair to do so, and I ask you to allow others to use any work you produce likewise, which is derivative from a work of mine. And if you are a licensed attorney who uses GIS I ask that you get out there and do your best to help the geospatial community. Those poor folks rarely have access to an attorney who can even understand basic geospatial concepts. Help our tribe out!
Fair Use Act Disclaimer
This page and all its subpages are for educational purposes only. I have never charged a GIS technician, GIS department, GIS or mapping association, or any mapping related enterprise a fee for my presentations or legal advice services. This information is provided as a public service to my friends in the geospatial community. It is my hope that the 3.5 year beating I took in law school during my late 40’s may somehow benefit the members of my GIS tribe. In my class materials I make fair use of a variety of materials created by others under the fair use doctrine.
Fair Use: Is a copyright disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor balancing test.
Factors: The four factors judges consider are:
- the purpose and character of your use
- the nature of the copyrighted work
- the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market.
Notice to Copyright Trolls: Don’t bother trying. I’ve been down the road with you bottom feeders before, and it will be a cold day in hell before I give you a dime.
Copyright Reciprocity: By using any of the materials on this page, and all subpages, you agree to abide by the Creative Commons Attribution’s rights, responsibilities, & conditions linked to below.
Geospatial Education Resources by Christopher W. Dunn, Esq. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://GeoVelo.com.
Disclaimer: I am not your attorney. Your viewing this web page and using the information here does not create an attorney-client relationship between us. The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon advertisements. While I am a licensed Missouri attorney and a member in good standing of the Missouri Bar Association, this information should not be considered legal advice, and is not offered as such.