Bing usage in the wiki?

Is it legal to use bing in images in the wiki? (e.g. in screenshots from JOSM or with manualy added lines)

The wiki is under cc-by-sa2.0 licence. The inserted images shall be in a compatible licence. Bing is only “granting the right to trace from their aerial imagery for the purpose of contributing content to OpenStreetMap”. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing .

The answer is ‘no’ for a mass use of Bing screenshots but I think there is some place for occasional and limited amount of images, especially when it is used to illustrate how “to trace from their imagery into OSM”. (ideally, the uploaded images in the wiki should be downgraded with JOSM lines, making the image reuse for other purposes impossible)

@LordOfMaps: As far as I know, and as Pieren said, we are not allowed to upload them to the wiki. However, it is done frequently and I am not aware of any policy or whatever about it. At least add a note to the images that they are not freely licensed and mention that it is a screenshot including [[bing]] imagery.

@Pieren: The wiki text is cc-by-sa 2.0, but the images have separate/explicit licenses attached – in principle. :wink: Not sure if one could assume that an image is cc-by-sa 2.0 if it has no license template at all.

I think it is not possible to safely assume that all images in the wiki are CC BY-SA unless stated otherwise - there are simply too many exceptions. For that reason, I’m happy when the license templates are being used.

I think we should be clear that bing imagery is not open licensed, and there isn’t some mechanism to open license bits of bing imagery by uploading them to the wiki. At the same time I don’t think we actually need to worry to much about somebody re-using a wiki page which has such images on it. They’re small extracts of imagery, and they’re for illustration of the process which bing is supportive of.

So to help people be clear about that, I’ve created a new template which we can start putting on such images: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Bing_image

It leaves a few open questions, but at least we can be seen to be trying to do the right thing

We could also make sure the Bing reference is on the image itself, as I think we are required to do when using it in an application for tracing. That way if the image gets separated from the page it is still identified as a Bing image.