[OSM-legal-talk] Attribution

[Richard Fairhurst]

Peter Miller wrote:

> Btw, who would you say was the Licensor for planet.osm was in the text you
> quote?  "to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource
> Identifier, if any, that *Licensor* specifies to be associated with the
> Work"

Erk. I'd guess (IANAL &c.) that the licensors are the individual OSM  
contributors (through the derived work provisions) and OSMF (as the  
creator of planet.osm).

Fortunately, both the contributors and OSMF specify  
www.openstreetmap.org as the URI to be associated with it!

> Also, do you think that listing the Original Authors on the OSM web site
> would be an appropriate interpretation of "give the Original Author credit
> reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name
> (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied"

The attribution-of-original-authors part of CC-BY-* is the bit I feel  
least confident about. I'd agree with your suggestion _if_ the licence  
doesn't insist that every contributor has to be credited. But it's a  
bit of a stretch to reinterpret "conveying the name" as "conveying the  
URL of a webpage where the name is listed" - especially for paper maps.

Look at wikitravel.org for an example of the problem. They're CC-BY-SA  
licensed, and to comply with the attribution requirement, every page  
footer has a list of contributors to that particular page. (In the  
very longest lists, this is abbreviated slightly, by means of an  
'...and [[others]]' link.) We don't do that.

cheers
Richard