Equitable collaboration is the future
Discover more from OpenBeta Project
Equitable collaboration is the future
MountainProject/onXmaps filed DMCA takedown against OpenBeta.
This past week, I woke up to a Cease and Desist letter from onXmaps, the new owner of MountainProject — a popular crowd-sourced climbing website.
Coincidentally, the C&D letter arrived the day after I posted an open letter on MountainProject forum calling for greater transparency regarding the use of crowd-sourced content on their site. I find it disappointing that instead of starting a dialog, onXmaps would try to preemptively shut down an open source project aiming to serve the climbing community.
In the C&D onXmaps alleges OpenBeta project has made “unauthorized use of substantial copyrighted data from MountainProject.com”. The data, in this case, are crowd-sourced content that the climbing community has contributed to over the years.
GitHub has complied with onXmaps’ DMCA takedown and blocked access to the climbing data repository which hosts data files containing climbing routes, names, grade, location, etc.
You can read the full DMCA notice here.
Volumes of crowd-sourced content were created by the climbing community with the intention of sharing them.
As a member of the community, I believe we should have the freedom to study, improve and re-share data so that the community can benefit from our work. In particular, OpenBeta project provides a free and open source Climbing API, while MountainProject has quietly removed a similar API from their site since its acquisition by onXmaps. In rock climbing we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Building walls around public knowledge and community contribution is taking a step backward.
onXmaps should focus their software engineering expertise on improving the experience of climbing by working with, not against, the community to enhance the climbing dataset.
onXmaps should learn from successful leaders in the open source software industry. For example, MapBox supports and contributes to OpenStreetMap, an open-geographical database, while earning the trust and loyalty of developers with their innovative mapping tools.
Next Steps
I encourage you to voice your support in the open letter thread. And please stay tuned for an important announcement.
Thanks for your support 💙
Viet Nguyen
—
Update: MountainProject has locked the open letter discussion. There’s currently a thread on reddit.com/r/climbing.
Equitable collaboration is the future
Thanks for the great post, Viet. I find it extremely unfortionate that onXmaps has taken the stance that it owns sole copyright over the data that has been generously submitted by users over the past 15+ years. This data (route grade, height, first ascent, description, etc) can be attributed to so many sources such as the first ascender, guide books, etc. None of this data has been submitted by onXmaps. The multitude of sources this data originated from indicates a desire by climbers to share with it with other climbers.
It's wrong for onXmaps to take on the philosophy they own exclusive right to the data when it exists outside their platform, too.
I hope that Mountain Project / onXmaps realizes this contrasting viewpoint and makes corrections to their actions.
I hope that as a climbing community we can collaborate to build a great collection of route information for the benefit, safety, and growth of the community.
I presume your lawyers know about the ProCD case - this should be an open and shut case with that precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProCD,_Inc._v._Zeidenberg