[OSM-legal-talk] Attribution Requirements

[Frederik Ramm]

Jonathan,

On 13.01.2014 13:17, Jonathan Harley wrote:
> What would happen if every data source started mandating
> that "our attribution must be in the corner"?

The thing is that for us, for OpenStreetMap, the attribution is our main
remuneration. We give our data away for free but in return, we expect to
get at least a little bit of exposure, a little help in "building our
brand" to borrow some marketing speak.

Much has been said about how happy we should be if people use our data,
because in the end it's all good for us becasue it increases our
mindshare and therefor our contributor numbers etc.; this reasoning
falls over if we allow users to bury us as an also-ran in a list of
building blocks for their map.

This would be different if we were a paid-for data source, in which case
our major remuneration would be the money people pay us for our data -
in that case, we could afford to be less demanding with regards to the
attribution.

But we aren't, and don't want to be. If OSM plays an important part in
your map, then credit us properly. There are many maps out there which
would be useless if you took away the OSM part, and nonetheless they are
adorned (on-map) with the names of those who made the tiles and those
who bought them for embedding in their web site, with OSM being
relegated to "one click away" - in order not to dilute the brand
building of those who rely on our data to make a map in the first place.
I don't think that's acceptable.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"