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Comment by robbbbbbbbbbbb | Hacker News Reader

Something seemed fishy about this as soon as I started reading the About page. A little digging turned up this great bit of reporting from HyperAllergic from January 2019: https://hyperallergic.com/480239/a-virtual-reality-app-that-....

EDIT for tl;dr purposes: the models and textures have almost entirely been developed through public funding over a 20 year period but have recently been trademarked by Bernie Frischer Consulting (AKA Flyover Zone Productions) which this website is serving as a shop window for. Seems pretty sleazy and a bit of a shame to me as: 1) it's a great if slightly patchy resource which sounds like it really should be under public access somehow; 2) a couple of hours in the hands of a decent 3D artist to setup lighting and cameras correctly would do this model so much more justice.

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Not sure I follow. You say they have been trademarked. The reference from the article that mentions trademark:

"As a staunch proponent of open data and open access to cultural heritage, I am disappointed to learn that the contributions made in good faith to promote the free and open proliferation knowledge have been commercialized. I am shocked that a project developed largely with taxpayer funding has been trademarked by a private company registered to Bernie Frischer himself."

It seems to me the word trademark actually refers to some kind of copyright? I agree that taxpayer's money should contribute to something that can be reused by others, and/or owned by public institutions. In this case it seems unclear what has happened. Is the data available so anyone can create the same kind of "product" or is the data copyrighted?

I would point you (and anyone else asking similar questions) to the article I linked above as it's well written and definitely better informed than I am.

Briefly, it sounds like the dataset is not copyrighted, but is also no longer publicly accessible. The artifacts produced from it (the 360 VR app, and this fly-through video) are copyrighted, proprietary products being marketed to schools, for profit.

I'm definitely not opposed to the use of open access data sets in creating commercial products, I think that's a great idea and I've done it myself in the past. But it does seem a shame in this case that the people doing the commercialising haven't done a great job of acknowledging others who've done the really hard work of creating the assets in the first place.

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