License for USA states and counties GeoJSON tiles

[jasondavies]

Are the USA states and counties tilesets hosted on Polymaps' AppEngine available for reuse under some license?

I could generate the tiles myself using the method described in #57, but it looks like some features were also clipped from Alaska to reduce the polygon counts.

I'm sure many would find it useful if the tiles used in the Polymaps examples were simply available under a license (ideally in a convenient .zip somewhere to save having to crawl the AppEngine host!)

/cc @migurski

[mbostock]

Hmm, that is a good question. I hope @migurski answers it.

[scotthmurray]

@jasondavies Did you ever find an answer to this? I'm beginning the process of converting shapefiles now, and would love a shortcut.

[jasondavies]

I didn't get an answer about the licensing question, so I ended up generating my own GeoJSON using various shapefiles (using ogr2ogr). If you need tiling I'd recommend Tilestache. For simplification, you can use something like MapShaper.

[scotthmurray]

Thanks, Jason! I ended up using ogr2ogr as well — worked like a charm, after the horrific install process.

In any case, I think it would save people in the community a ton of time if someone just did this conversion once and then posted the GeoJSON files. The only reason I can think of not to do that is if that would conflict with a license on the Census's original data. Yet, I don't see any license (or even copyright) cited on their site: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/index.html

Could it be in the public domain? I'll try to confirm, and then may just package up some pre-processed GeoJSON for others to use.

[scotthmurray]

Confirmed the shapefiles are not copyrighted and are free to use / remix / alter:

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/faq.html#27

[sidkshatriya]

In general all US Government works are not subject to copyright and are in the public domain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government

For all shapefiles available at:
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/

See:
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/tigerfaq?Q10