[OSM-talk] Omaha World-Herald using OSM without attribution

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 18 December 2014, Clifford Snow wrote:
>
> I agree that continued reading would indicate that attribution should
> appear on the main map. But the way its worded is troubling. "as
> commonly seen..." I commonly see links as geocaching.com has
> provided. The wiki wording is giving an out from giving credit on the
> main page. I'd much rather see attribution on the map. Do you think
> rewording the wiki to make it clear that it must be on the front page
> would provide us better conformance?
>
> The geocaching.com site is pretty straight forward. They clearly use
> our base map with Mapquest tiles with an overlay of their own nodes.
> Others are less clear. OSM base maps with multiple overlays from
> other sources. At what point does the attribution get so cluttered
> that other forms to show credit are more practical?

The license is pretty clear here, the relevant part is in 4.3 of the 
ODbL:

You must include a notice associated with the Produced Work reasonably 
calculated to make any Person that uses, views, accesses, interacts 
with, or is otherwise exposed to the Produced Work aware that Content 
was obtained from the Database, Derivative Database, or the Database as 
part of a Collective Database, and that it is available under this 
License

The 'in the corner of the map' is just a suggestion but it is generally 
understood that showing a note by default with any display containing a 
significant amount of OSM data is necessary, at minimum '(c) 
OpenStreetMap' with a link to the OSM copyright page.

The argument that this might lead to clutterring the display in cases 
where many data sources are used has also frequently been discussed 
already.  The main difference between OSM and other data providers is 
that for OSM the credits are the only form of gratification.  Therefore 
it is not as frivolous as it might seem at the first glance to demand 
something that would be impractical to give to all sources.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/