Copyright for geoplot basemaps

Hi all,

I have a manuscript ready for publication in an academic journal. In the figures I use the 'streets-light' basemap (geoplot) as part of my plots. I have been trying to find information about the copyright of this material, and if/how I can use it. I am citing MATLAB within the paper, but need to know if additional credit/citations are required for the usage of the basemap in my figures?

Thanks

[Rik]

Questions on this forum are mainly answered by volunteers. Those working for Mathworks tend to answer questions only on personal title. You may need to contact support directly.

[Jiri Hajek]

Hi, I believe that if you use a valid MATLAB license that allows such work (research, not classroom) and since the maps are included within MATLAB under your license, it is not for the user, but for Mathworks to take care of the rights for all parts of the software.

[Rik]

I am not a lawyer.

I believe the comment by Jiri is true for your own use (and for things like plots you create), but not for resharing material.

You should never rely on legal advice from a third party you do not know and whose legal expertise you cannot verify.

[Will Schneider]

Thank you both very much for your comments. I have also sent a query to support get an answer there. Cheers.

[Will Schneider]

They replied that they "do not explain any components of the MathWorks Software License Agreement to customers", which is fairly unhelpful but there you go!

[James]

Did you read the Software License Agreement? I imagine nobody other than the lawyers at MathWorks are allowed to do anything other than directly quote what is written. I learned that from working at some big tech companies.

[Rik]

I had expected they would be allowed to say which parts included in Matlab are not covered by the license agreement, but apparently not.

[James]

That doesn't surprise me. At the 2 biggest tech companies I worked at, the answer was always, "Read the license agreement" since we were told anything other than that was considered "interpretation" and therefore a potential legal issue. Blame lawyers and the culture of suing.

Answer 1

[Stefanie Schwarz]

Currently, our map data is provided by either Natural Earth or Esri® depending on the used basemap.

Refer to the "geobasemap" documentation to see which basemap is provided by which host: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/geobasemap.html#mw_43bac43a-ebf4-4d4e-a550-f6fe5ed09ac4

As you can see, the 'streets-light' basemap is hosted by Esri. These high-zoom-level basemaps hosted by Esri use dynamic attribution and are correct. The attribution is obtained from the Esri web service and changes as you pan and zoom when the data sources change.

Do not crop this attribution out of basemap images. If the attribution is not readable, then display the attribution somewhere else on the figure, such as in the title.

If you want to obtain the attribution for a high-zoom-level basemaps hosted by Esri, then you can use the Mapping Toolbox "readBasemapImage" function in R2022a and later. Please refer to the documentation below for more information:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/map/ref/readbasemapimage.html#mw_49fb4f09-0331-4fb8-ae72-a1dc8c43df78

The third output argument "attrib" contains the Basemap attribution. Here is example code to get the attribution for an existing geographic figure:

% plot data and change basemap
>> GT = readgeotable("boston_placenames.gpx");
>> geoplot(GT)
>> geobasemap("streets")

% read basemap image; get handle to axes using gca
>> gx = gca;
>> [~,~,attrib] = readBasemapImage(gx.Basemap,gx.LatitudeLimits,gx.LongitudeLimits)
% or 
% [~,~,attrib] = readBasemapImage(gx.Basemap,gx.MapCenter,gx.ZoomLevel)

attrib = 

    "Harvard University, City of Boston, City of Cambridge, Esri, HERE, Garmin, INCREMENT P, NGA, USGS"