That seems to be OpenStreetMap’s position than British Airways’.
AStonesThrow · 22h ago
I believe that Drew's primary point is that BA is republishing this and therefore, more or less standing behind it as their position as well. And it's worth noting that the blog post opens by describing their valiant effort to search for copyright notices or some other indicator of who wrote/provided/published the information therein.
And I don't know about OSM's techniques, but the foremost digital map providers often use heuristics to determine what to display in certain situations. It is said that Google Maps displays "Gulf of America" nomenclature to users in the U.S.A. or users with a United States/English locale, while displaying "Gulf of Mexico" to users located elsewhere.
Likewise, Wikipedia has run up against disputes where foreign governments are trying to get them to take down maps and diagrams that indicate "the wrong borders" and they're grappling with how to "accurately reflect" a disputed territory that really depends on perspective or nationality or location to properly depict it.
As Drew indicates, their flight track was from London to Tokyo, and therefore would not have located the aircraft in such regions as Israel/Palestine. Would the OSM results have been different if it was located thus? It seems that most of the data in question is static.
N19PEDL2 · 2h ago
> I believe that Drew's primary point is that BA is republishing this and therefore, more or less standing behind it as their position as well.
Not necessarily. I flew on Emirates a couple of months ago and when opening the flight map there was a disclaimer saying that the company used third-party map services and that they did not necessarily reflect the company's position on territorial disputes.
This makes sense in terms of PR: if the company did edit those maps, it would need to take a position on certain issues that might please some passengers but upset others.
AStonesThrow · 2h ago
Well you can "not necessarily" all you want, but Drew was not flying Emirates, did not find any disclaimers whatsoever, and Drew spells it out in plain language for their blog entry:
Given that British Airways is the proud flag carrier of the United Kingdom I assume that this is indeed the only off-the-shelf copyrighted material included in this display, and everything else was developed in-house without relying on any open source software that might require a disclosure of license and copyright details. For similar reasons I am going to assume that all of the borders shown in this map are reflective of the official opinion of British Airways on various international disputes.
Now this may indeed not be the case for British Airways, but I think Drew's point is clear that whatever they're publishing on their maps is going to be taken as "what they believe" at the very least, and yes, a disclaimer may stave off some sort of legal challenge to that, but disclaimers are rather weak in the face of more compelling evidence.
And I don't know about OSM's techniques, but the foremost digital map providers often use heuristics to determine what to display in certain situations. It is said that Google Maps displays "Gulf of America" nomenclature to users in the U.S.A. or users with a United States/English locale, while displaying "Gulf of Mexico" to users located elsewhere.
Likewise, Wikipedia has run up against disputes where foreign governments are trying to get them to take down maps and diagrams that indicate "the wrong borders" and they're grappling with how to "accurately reflect" a disputed territory that really depends on perspective or nationality or location to properly depict it.
As Drew indicates, their flight track was from London to Tokyo, and therefore would not have located the aircraft in such regions as Israel/Palestine. Would the OSM results have been different if it was located thus? It seems that most of the data in question is static.
Not necessarily. I flew on Emirates a couple of months ago and when opening the flight map there was a disclaimer saying that the company used third-party map services and that they did not necessarily reflect the company's position on territorial disputes.
This makes sense in terms of PR: if the company did edit those maps, it would need to take a position on certain issues that might please some passengers but upset others.
Given that British Airways is the proud flag carrier of the United Kingdom I assume that this is indeed the only off-the-shelf copyrighted material included in this display, and everything else was developed in-house without relying on any open source software that might require a disclosure of license and copyright details. For similar reasons I am going to assume that all of the borders shown in this map are reflective of the official opinion of British Airways on various international disputes.
Now this may indeed not be the case for British Airways, but I think Drew's point is clear that whatever they're publishing on their maps is going to be taken as "what they believe" at the very least, and yes, a disclaimer may stave off some sort of legal challenge to that, but disclaimers are rather weak in the face of more compelling evidence.
Here's the OSM Wiki page on 'disputed territories': https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputed_territories
The official document from the OpenStreetMap Foundation is here: https://osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesI...