Applications for the protection of digital geospatial data in the content of e-government

The base core component of geographic information systems consists of digital spatial data sets. Spatial data sets are expensive to create and are now very easy to copy. So, we need intellectual property rights to protect them. The easiness and cheapness in copying or counterfeiting these products, which require high costs and long studies of many specialists when compared to other products, proved that only technical without legal protection, is nonsense. Digital images are the products which can be easily modified, copied and duplicated. One of the studies to solve copyright protection on the digital images is to embed some information about the author, production year or logo. This information can be embedded into an image where it can be perceptually either visible or invisible.This study, mentions the copyrights in digital spatial data within the frame of the Intellectual Property Rights Law numbered 5846 and discusses the legal and technical methods to protect digital spatial data against unauthorized use and explains how to utilize the raster map watermarking systems that illegal use by preventing unauthorized access to data and from execution of protected applications.