[d1sxeyes]

So copyright should only apply to stuff that’s not useful?

Whatever the term of copyright should be, there’s no doubt that it was a significant endeavour to create it, and it creatively expresses the topography of London.

Your analogy doesn’t work very well I’m afraid. The Mercator projection is 500 years old, and generally speaking, you can only copyright specific works, not processes. If you want to protect a process from being used by others commercially, you need a patent, and generally patents are not as long lived as copyright.

[mmastrac]

No, but it's far more likely that fair use applies to something that is more _useful_ than _creative_, ie: maps and dictionaries.

Regardless of how much effort a copyrighted work to produce, most Western countries have a fair-use equivalent to transformative use of a work: https://lawdit.co.uk/readingroom/intellectual-property-law-g....

[d1sxeyes]

Odd that this site is a “.co.uk” but talks about the US fair use doctrine. The UK does indeed have “fair use” (actually called fair dealing) but this wouldn’t come under it as far as I can tell (IANAL, etc.)

[saaaaaam]

The copyright exceptions in the UK are very limited. There would not be a copyright exception in this situation.

[ForHackernews]

Copyright exists to incentivize creators to make more art.

In the case of "utility" works like maps, charts, diagrams, there is already ample motivation to create them – people want to be able to navigate, scientists want others to understand their data, etc.