[Imports] Washington State county boundaries

[Josh Doe]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 2:24 AM, Toby Murray <toby.murray at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...] The best source I found was the Washington
> State Department of Ecology. Their copyright page seemed clear at
> first but then pnorman on IRC muddied the waters and suggested I get
> some input from a wider audience. The page in question is here:
> http://www.ecy.wa.gov/copyright.html
>
> Seems like a basic attribution requirement. But of course that gets
> complicated with derived works and whatnot. I guess I'll send someone
> at the department a quick email too and see what they say. [...]

Definitely ask them for clarification, but AFAIK it's straightforward:
"Unless specifically identified as the property of another party, all
text, data, [...] found on Ecology's Web sites, including [...] the
linked database and map servers, are the copyrighted property of the
Washington State Department of Ecology"
- They own the copyright, good.

"Commercial use and commercial publication of the Material are
specifically prohibited, except as specified below."
- Wait for it

"Users may use data from Ecology's Web sites provided the Washington
State Department of Ecology is credited as the data provider and a
link is provided to the Ecology data source Web page."
- The key here is that they don't specify where the attribution must
occur. This is no different than CC-BY-SA or ODbL, where attribution
is acceptably placed in other places than on the map, such as in our
Contributors wiki page [0]. They also don't have any requirements
which transfer to any users of the data which we use from them. (e.g.
forbidding sublicensing, or specifying how we sublicense).

Then again, I would be surprised if TIGER is very much different from
this data, since TIGER generally uses data provided by states and
localities (at least true in the case of Virginia roads).

-Josh

[0]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors