[OSM-talk] attribution in geocoding

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

After browing the pages of a company that offers OSM based geocoding, I
have been reading again through the geocoding guidelines
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidelines/Geocoding_-_Guideline

In particular this part: "If the Geocoder is Publicly Used, then the
provider of the Geocoder ... must provide attribution to OpenStreetMap as
described in Section 4.3 of the ODbL"

So basically everybody using this geocoder should be made aware that the
results are based on data from OpenStreetMap.

I believe this implies that you should not be able to sign up, generate an
API key, use the testing tutorials and switch to batch geocoding without
necessarily having been presented some kind of note about the data being
from OSM and licensed ODbL. The latter, because of:

 "If Geocoding Results are used to create a new database that contains the
whole or a substantial part of the contents of the OSM database, this new
database would be considered a Derivative Database and would trigger
share-alike obligations under section 4.4.b of the ODbL."

Creating a database is one of the primary uses of a geocoding service. Of
course you could throw the results away, but for many use cases you will
keep them.

What do you think how should appropriate attribution look like when
providing geocoding services?

Cheers,
Martin
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