How to get Attribution information for correct licensing

@Lulu-Ann: This makes me a little bit confused, iā€™m not a lawyer, but i have found this: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Attribution and this: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Whose_node_is_it%3F and this:
http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262:
ā€œWhen you copy it, you have to give credit to the copyright owner (Attribution).ā€
And finally this one: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Do i misunderstand something?

Dan

Our license is CC-BY-SA, so the requirements are

  • SA: share alike Ƃā€“ when you redistribute the work or modifications thereof, you have to use the same license for your version of the work and mention the license.
  • BY: attribution Ƃā€“ when you redistribute the work, you have to name the creators of the work.

The images on Wikipedia conform to the SA part, but they do not list the creators, i.e. the OSM contributors who have entered the data. That this may be legally required at least under some jurisdictions is largely consensus on legal-talk Ƃā€“ the links DanSy has found and included in his last posting reflect this opinion (and point out some of the other problems with our current license).

To get all users that have edited an area on openstreetmap use:
http://www.itoworld.com/static/osmmapper

but from FAQ:**
I know I edited a feature - why is it not listed under my username?
**
Currently the feature is only listed under the user that last touched it. We are working to make this more flexible.

About the license issue, I would like to state that it should be enough to have ā€œmade by Openstreetmap collaboratorsā€ as the copyright owner. This is what Openstreetmap.org does so, so this is the way it is done and that weights alot when you are talking about law. If you have a cookie jar where you have to pay, but no one has done this in the last 20 years, then you canā€™t just pick one random guy have him arrested and still let other people have free cookies.

The need to list all individual contributors seems to me to be contrary to the whole point of OSM - that the maps should be available for use in other projects. Requiring individual contributors to be listed simply means that the vast majority of people will either ignore the licence conditions or simply wonā€™t use the work. The first case is particularly important as if OSM donā€™t enforce the licence, many courts will simply void it completely.

The fact that it is not possible for one to retrieve a complete list of contributors (see the point above about features only being allocated to the last person who touched them) would seem to make the licence pointless anyway. Even if a complete list of contributors were to be available, should it consist of nickname, full name, address, e-mail address etc.? This opens up a whole new can of worms.

At the moment, it would seem that the easiest way to comply with the licence would be to ā€˜touchā€™ every single node within the given area and then only list yourself as a contributor!

Surely ā€˜BYā€™ should simply mean stating 'Map from http://www.openstreetmap.org/'?

Nick.

The second statement is clearly wrong, see my first post on this subject, you will gain nothing by touching nodes the history is still there.

The first statement is and old argument against the BSD license which used to have a ā€œgive all contributors creditā€ clausul. But for us handling maps, it would be pretty trivial to add map application to list every contributor to a zoom14 tile, so if the need to do this is great then there will be a solution. Storing contributors names isnā€™t going to be that much of a deal 10,000 users editting isnā€™t that much, especially considering the amount of data map applications handle.

Iā€™m not saying it should be done I just say it can be done pretty painlessly (this is acutally easier than getting the map to render)

Edit: just realized that this will be hard to do from a planet.osm dumpā€¦ :wink:

Well, stating ā€œjust use it illegally, trust us, we wonā€™t prosecute you for itā€ is not the correct way in my opinion.

I donā€™t know perhaps iā€™m completely wrong with that, but i think OSM should gather the agreement of the contributors and give out a legal statement saying something like:

ā€œGiving a reference (permalink) of the area used and the citation , is enough to comply with the attribution required by CC.ā€

Why this:

  1. I think, that there is a of lot work left to do (itā€™s quite a big worldā€¦) and the more peoples are using your maps, the more contributers will have this project, public relation is what itā€™s all about.

  2. ā€œBut i want to be credited for my hard work, i was crawling 2 years through the jungle with my GPS!ā€ Sure the contributors should have the right to be attributed, but who has ever red the creditpage of FireFox or OpenOffice? I didnā€™tā€¦ So, if somebody really is interested in the originator, he also gonna find him/her, if itā€™s by means of a special page or a link, i donā€™t see a big difference (except in the case that there is no internet available).

  3. I think it is even better to link the area, because a listing of 10000 nodes is not very useful, nobody will ever read that. If somebody for any reason wants to know, who was the contributor of a specific node, a map is better, because nodes only have numbers.

sincerely Dan

OK. What I should have said was ā€œThe fact that it is not possible to easily retrieve a complete list of contributorsā€.

By way of example, I have the URL ā€œhttp://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.38767&lon=-1.65321&zoom=16&layers=0B0FTFTā€ which Iā€™d like to save as a pretty JPEG.

Even thatā€™s not easy - as soon as I click on ā€˜exportā€™, my screen geometry changes and I have to dicker about until I can get everything in before I manually crop the image to get back to where I was. Anyway, after all that I have a picture. Now to get the contributors.

Hmmmm. How do I end up with an .osm file? Ah, export as XML doesnā€™t do what I assumed (create a .xml file), it creates a .osm. Next problem - Now Iā€™ve got to work out what URL to call to get that file down onto the Linux box (no GUI!)ā€¦

Hmmm. Hereā€™s where the fun starts. So, I need a way of going from the page URL (for example, ā€œhttp://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.38767&lon=-1.65321&zoom=16&layers=0B0FTFā€) to the URL called when the form is submitted (taking into account the change of screen geometry).

OK. I give up, I donā€™t think I can do that in five minutes. So, I now have the .osm file on the Windows box and Iā€™ll SFTP it to the Linux box for processingā€¦

And soā€¦ The end result is:

ā€œRichardā€:6
ā€œblackadderā€:87
ā€œsouthglosā€:4
ā€œmorwenā€:1
"Thomas:1
ā€œDamocovā€:130
ā€œulflā€:1
"Nick:566

Which is wrong. ā€œThomasā€ should be ā€œThomas Maternā€ and ā€œNickā€ should be ā€œNick Barnesā€. OK, OK, I know Iā€™m being picky and if I knew Perl Iā€™d hack the code to allow for spaces. However, whether it says ā€˜Nickā€™ or ā€˜Nick Barnesā€™, that information still isnā€™t useful in any way, shape or form. Consider a third party looking at the list of names. ā€œHmmmm.ā€, they think, ā€œI wonder who ā€˜blackadderā€™ is and which part they didā€. They still have to come back to the site to find out. This has achieved absolutely nothing more than simply attributing the map to the site would have done in the first place.

Anyway, I ramble. My point is, it is not realistic to expect anybody who wants to use images to be able to do this and Iā€™m also not sure that the usernames are adequate attribution even if it were.

The example above is for a small village and yet has 8 contributors. What about a map of, say, London? Am I expected to list the several hundred contributors? If anybody says ā€˜yesā€™ at this point, we may as well all pack up and go home as no bu88er will ever use OSM maps.

Letā€™s say I want a map of Birmingham on a T-Shirt Iā€™m going to sell. Do you really want me to list all the contributors? Even looking at the ā€˜pressā€™ section of the wiki and reading the legal licence stuff, itā€™s not clear that newspapers, magazines et al have to print a complete list. I canā€™t imagine a journalist would be willing to spend the time collating such a list either.

Attribution by anything other than a single blanket ā€œby OSM contributorsā€ is simply ridiculous. To expect otherwise is ludicrous in the extreme and I suspect that if a licence contravention case ever came to court, OSM would be laughed out of the building. Enforcing the licence in those terms would have the effect of scuttling the ship weā€™re all sailing in.

Nick.

Just tried to get the user list for London and couldnā€™t! I had to zoom in a fair way before the server didnā€™t choke! 20,000 nodes later, I end up with a list thatā€™s 215 names long.

So, assuming I want a small thumbnail on my website, Iā€™ll need 100 times the space just to list the contributors. Hmmmm.

Nick.

The accepted standard is a phrase such as:

ā€œMap data licensed CC-BY-SA OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap Foundation and contributors)ā€

hyperlinked to the appropriate places. Iā€™ve copied this verbatim from Andy Allanā€™s cyclemap and no-one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever objected to that.

CC-BY-SA can be read (indeed, itā€™s my reading) to say that you have to attribute every single contributor. That is clearly insane. That is one of the reasons why we are actively considering replacing CC-BY-SA with a licence expressly designed for large-scale collaborative databases, i.e. the Open Database Licence.

Of course, in your particular case, ā€œRichard: 6ā€ is me; and like many others, Iā€™ve expressly dedicated all my OSM contributions to the public domain (by means of a little ā€œuserboxā€ on my wiki page). So you can miss out that bit in any case.

@Richard: But iā€™m not sure, that this is the position of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, because of pages like these:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Attribution
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Whose_node_is_it%3F
http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

These are links i have found on this server.

ā€œThe accepted standard is a phrase such asā€¦ā€ please tell me, where i can find written something like that on this server.

sincerely Dan

Everything is possible if this is really what you want to have. So the first question is ā€œShould you name everyone that has contributed to this mapā€, the second is ā€œCan I name everyone who has created this mapā€.

First question, many people think ā€œMap data licensed CC-BY-SA OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap Foundation and contributors)ā€ is enough, even http://openstreetmap.org does this, I see nothing illegal with this. I still think contributors should be listed and in most small scale maps this will be possible since many areas only have one contributor (see OSM quality evaluation).

Second question, if you have to you can develop something that does this for you. Your good arguments are about physical media, the t-shirt and that is the kind of things that makes it impossible to name everyone. But information that remains electronically can almost always have attribution, if you have to.

The export function could be explained better, .osm is XML with openstreetmap schema.

I donā€™t understand how you got the .osm file. Iā€™ve actually thought about this myself, translating map URLs to API URLs is too hard.

Fixed, lazy regexp! I blame it on all Swedes that have sane user names with out spaces. :slight_smile:

I wonder if the fight to enlighten people that intellectual property can be bad, has made people so aware about the cumbersome issues, that they are afraid to create anything at all. CC is about freedom to use our material creatively, and letting other people be creative from that material.

@emj: But creating something that can only be used with the knowledge, that its illegal, lets peoples also be afraid of using it at all! This is the second part of the story. Its all about freedom, also that one of the users of your data, think about itā€¦ Iā€™m not paranoid (well just a little bit), but aware of.

sincerely Dan

Dan - er, thanks awfully, but as Iā€™m currently the OSMF board member with responsibility for licensing, and I wrote the blog posting in question (inter alia), Iā€™m quite aware of those links.

Like I say, this sort of problem is exactly why weā€™re considering changing the licence. It is impossible to conform to the letter of the current licence - not just difficult, impossible - in a way that will be considered acceptable by everyone. Phrases such as the one I quoted are the best substitute until then.

@Richard: ā€œweā€™re considering changing the licenceā€ And what is the timescale for that project?

Donā€™t you think, that it would be a good idea to mention that clearly somewhere, to avoid, that people like me, bother you with question like that?

Sincerely Dan

I thought that was the entire point of http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262 (one of the links you quoted), but never mind. :slight_smile:

@Richard: Sorry i think there is a little misunderstanding: With ā€œmention that clearlyā€ i didnā€™t mean, that there is awareness of the problem, i think this is clear enough, i meant you should clearly notice to users of your data, that its:

ā€œMap data licensed CC-BY-SA OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap Foundation and contributors)ā€

is the method of licensing correctly your work until an other solution is found.

And with ā€œAnd what is the timescale for that project?ā€ i wanted to know if there is now an exact project to move the license with a Date and soā€¦ (Sorry for that question, but the post was from January and they ware talking about ā€œthat a new revision will be available in the near future.ā€, so i thoughtā€¦)

Sincerely Dan

Well everything is more or less illegal, especially wikipedia is all one big collective copyright violation. When trouble comes to Wikipedia Iā€™ll be worried for the customers of OSM.

@emj: :slight_smile:

Indeed :slight_smile: I forgot that.