Hi,

What is the license for the topos on wikitopo? 

By example, Wikipedia uses a CC-SA license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License).  The OpenStreetMap uses the same license (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_License).

I couldn't find any mention of this on the site, apart from a disclaimer.

License information is pretty important as it allows users to know if they may print out the topos, share them, or even incorporate the information into a guide book for sale.

Cheers,

Patrick

A good question Patrick.

Although we have not yet got round to putting a formal policy in place, the core idea of wikitopo is a platform where climbers can share and collaboratively edit topos. We have gone to some effort to make the topos easy to save as PDFs and print so obviously we don't have a problem with that. We have also promoted the idea of people embedding the topos in other sites.

Our attitude that the content belongs to the community as a whole and you can take that to be our default position.

Having said this, some contributors might prefer to keep more control over their input and we would be willing to find ways to allow this if there were any call for it.

I think you are right that we need to clarify this with something more formal and Ill be looking into CC-SA as you suggest.

We are keen to hear what other users think  - particularly contributors - on this thread.

The law (in the US & EU) is pretty strict on this matter : unless otherwise stated, the works are copyright of their respective authors.  That means all existing topos on the site are copyright.  Authors have to explicitly give their permission for reuse.  By example, when one edits an article on wikipedia (ex : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ice_climbing&action=edit) the following text is displayed :

"Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. You irrevocably agree to release your contributions under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license. See the Terms of Use for details."

It's legal, and it's boring, but it's important!