Re: Do any GPS units let you upload your own maps?

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:22:24 -0700, Dan Anderson
<danderson2001@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm talking about selling the maps to others . . .

Well the OP did ask about loading "his own" maps - I took that to mean
maps that he had made. You may have interpreted that to mean maps
that he had bought. I don't really think it matters.

Someone has to violate a contract to get the format.

Not necessarily so.

If you have ever worked yourself, or with others, who have had to
decode hex and come up with a scheme of number representation used by
another person, when you knew the type of data that the code
represented, you'd realize that this is not true. In many cases,
given a format that is not too convoluted, it is not even all that
difficult. I think TI still sells those hex calculators, don't they?

It may not be easy to figure out the format by some intuitive process,
especially not for someone who hasn't done much assembler programming,
but certaily not impossible. With the right examples, it could even
be shown in a court that it is reasonable to expect to find people who
could read an img file almost as easily as you or I would read an
ascii text file. This is not reverse engineering - it is looking at a
file, understanding the data, and making a similar file with different
data.

Someone doing this decoding of the format would only have to know that
the file representated a map of sorts - they would not have to know
that the file is for a garmin, or any other, gps receiver. They would
never have to have seen a garmin contract, much less agreed to it.

Where's the violation?

.

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