Microsoft and Vic Govt correct iTWire directions on IP

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 21 March 2006 06:40

IT Industry - Deals

Our innocent little story on the Victorian Government’s public transport directions system developed for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games has apparently caused a few feathers to ruffle over the ownership of the intellectual property.

In our story, we reported that Microsoft would retain ownership of the intellectual property underlying the Directions Plus system and intended to resell it around the world. However, calls from the Victorian Government’s ICT agency, Multimedia Victoria, and Microsoft have been made to impress upon us that the IP is in fact jointly owned by Microsoft, the Victorian Government and Victorian-based geospatial systems specialist, Geomatic Technologies.

A Microsoft spokesperson indicated that if indeed the company is involved with selling the system around the world it would in fact be working with Geomatic Technologies, which did a large portion of the development.

A spokesperson from Multimedia Victoria told us yesterday the Victorian Government “owns the data” of Directions Plus. That is the Victorian Government owns the data contained in a database aligning public transport with various venues around Melbourne which was created by Geomatic Technologies.

So who owns what?

Geomatic Technologies sales and marketing manager, Andrew Bashfield, told iTWire that the company’s involvement involved taking the various data sets supplied by the Victorian Government and aligning them into a usable database housed on servers in Geomatics’ Melbourne office. “There were quite a lot of different types of data sets concerning the road system, the public transport system and tourism locations,” said Bashfield. “A lot of the work that we had to carry out was aligning of that data, such address matching of tourist sites with the road and public transportation data.”

As far as Microsoft contribution to the project is concerned, it provided the development and implementation platform. The pocket PCs in the field are running Windows CE; Windows Server 2003 is operating on the backend; the system was developed using Visual Studio 2005 and “made use of the .Net framework.”

So what we have is an innovative system developed by a small Victorian-based geospatial systems developer on a Microsoft platform using data supplied by the Victorian Government. And all three parties claim joint-ownership of the intellectual property. Neither Bashfield of Geomatic Technologies, nor anyone else, was able to say, however, what the implications of such an arrangement would have for tendering for future business around the world. For instance, would a consortium of all three parties put in a bid for say the Beijing Olympics? All Bashfield would say, however, was: “We intend to sell this system elsewhere and the more people that know about it the better.”