So copyright should only apply to stuff that’s not useful?
Whatever the term of copyright should be, there’s no doubt that it was a significant endeavour to create it, and it creatively expresses the topography of London.
Your analogy doesn’t work very well I’m afraid. The Mercator projection is 500 years old, and generally speaking, you can only copyright specific works, not processes. If you want to protect a process from being used by others commercially, you need a patent, and generally patents are not as long lived as copyright.
Odd that this site is a “.co.uk” but talks about the US fair use doctrine. The UK does indeed have “fair use” (actually called fair dealing) but this wouldn’t come under it as far as I can tell (IANAL, etc.)
Copyright exists to incentivize creators to make more art.
In the case of "utility" works like maps, charts, diagrams, there is already ample motivation to create them – people want to be able to navigate, scientists want others to understand their data, etc.
Whatever the term of copyright should be, there’s no doubt that it was a significant endeavour to create it, and it creatively expresses the topography of London.
Your analogy doesn’t work very well I’m afraid. The Mercator projection is 500 years old, and generally speaking, you can only copyright specific works, not processes. If you want to protect a process from being used by others commercially, you need a patent, and generally patents are not as long lived as copyright.