[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] License missing on many web pages

[Rob Myers]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com> wrote:

> Personally I believe that it is entirely appropriate and practical for all
> 60,000 contributors (or 600,000!) to be listed on the OpenStreetMap website;
> that seems entirely 'appropriate for the medium or means' and I suggest we
> do it.

Yes.

> However... it doesn't seem appropriate to list all the contributors on a map
> showing how to get to the village hall in their news-letter, in that case I
> think crediting OSM with a URL is appropriate and 'reasonable to the
> medium'.

Yes.

> If people want to see who worked on the map then they can click
> through to the OSM website and find a full list of contributors there, or
> possibly we could even sort out a query to list contributors within any
> particular bounding-box.

If there is a fork of OSM or a derivative project should the new
project should maintain the attribution data on its site then become
the new reference for attribution? Or should it add its URL alongside
the OSM one?

The Creative Commons licences from version 2.5 (OSM uses version 2)
allow attribution to go to an organization rather than an individual.
So there's a precedent for this kind of thing within alternative
licencing.

> In the mean time, the advise to credit maps and distributed data with the
> phrase 'map data CCbySA www.openstreetmap.org' seems sensible advise!

This can be achieved by making openstreetmap.org the associated URI
for the work, from the terms of the licence. See 4c:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode

So insisting on the URL as the means of communicating attribution
where listing all x thousand contributors is not "appropriate to the
medium" seems like a good solution (I am not a lawyer, this is not
legal advice).

- Rob.