[OSM-legal-talk] attributing cc by attribution data

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> during a discussion [2] around this data, the problem of how to
> attribute it has come up - is there a commonly-used method for
> attributing data in osm?
> 
> if not, does anyone have any ideas of how we might accomplish this?
> 
> the owner of the site has not yet specified any particular method he
> requires; i would like to be able to present him with some options if
> possible
> 
> there is a wiki page [3] devoted to including this data in OSM,
> including a couple of ideas i had on how to do this

This is something that needs some wider attention, we could use this
for other cases as well. The way I see it we're talking about
something that is somewhere between the "source" tag and the username
who last edited something.

The "source" currently remains untouched unless somebody explicitly
removes it, but is not listed anywhere. Very often, "source" contains
stuff that cannot be used for attribution. (The fact that people don't
remove the tag often annoys me. If something says "source: landsat"
and you move it because your GPS track shows it to be elsewhere, then
it is no longer "source: landsat"... but automatically removing the
source is also problematic.)

The "last edit" username is used for attribution in Osmarender z17 but
it is very volatile; it always shows the name of the last person
making a change which is not what you want.

This also touches on the (legal) question what it takes to remove
someone's IP from data. If I create a way from your data then it is
your IP and if you specify a "BY" license I have to attribute you even
if I make changes. But if the changes are so exhaustive that nothing
of the original character of your data remains, then surely at some
point you cannot ask to be attributed any longer (unless law is
homeopathy in a way) - but where would that point lie?

I think we could create a new tag "attribution=...", and modify
renderers to include a list of all "attribution" values. For slippy
map displays this would probably require an extra server of sorts that
returns a nice concatenated attribution string for any area. That
server could be populated by t at h clients as they have the data anyway,
or it could load stuff from OSMXapi.

For the reasons given above, it seems not viable to me to use the
existing source tag OR the username of the user making the last edit.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'