MP v. OB: anyone have feelings to share?

When OnX sells out, literally, yall are gunna be thanking OB for protecting the data.

Attribution matters -- it provides a little incentive for people to contribute to the community, and also provides some incentive also for people to do a good job with their contributions.

Permission matters -- each person who contributes their time, energy, and personal experience in writing up a route or area description is the author of that work. Wholesale scraping of that work and republishing without attribution is shitty.

Viet neither asked users for permission before scraping the data from MP, nor does OB provide attribution to authors. I've had some communication with him and he may be working on an attribution mechanism, but that is at best a half-measure. Removing the data scraped without permission is what I would like to see.

bryanswrote:

I do not at all support the way OB went about scraping data so fast they didn't find a way to credit authors, but this still feels like a lot of pearl-clutching going on about people's precious route descriptions. You didn't write a song, or a screenplay, or a patent to cure cancer. You told people where to find and how to most safely climb a chunk of stone you don't own, and at most drilled some metal into, knowing that when you hit "submit" the platform owner would own your words. Didn't you post the route on MP precisely to reach as many people as possible with the littlest effort, and now OB is simply amplifying your intent? If you truly wanted to protect your unique and precious words, why didn't you publish a guide and copyright them instead? I'm sincerely mystified at the support for MP and the vituperative language towards OB. I can see how MP would be upset to lose some clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue, but how exactly are they harming you the user? 

We both see things in a similar light. I might add that people who spend countless hours posting up routes on the internet for the entire planet to have for free should really consider writing small and cheap guidebooks instead , self publishing is as easy as it ever has been.

bryanswrote:

I do not at all support the way OB went about scraping data so fast they didn't find a way to credit authors, but this still feels like a lot of pearl-clutching going on about people's precious route descriptions. You didn't write a song, or a screenplay, or a patent to cure cancer. You told people where to find and how to most safely climb a chunk of stone you don't own, and at most drilled some metal into, knowing that when you hit "submit" the platform owner would own your words. Didn't you post the route on MP precisely to reach as many people as possible with the littlest effort, and now OB is simply amplifying your intent? If you truly wanted to protect your unique and precious words, why didn't you publish a guide and copyright them instead? I'm sincerely mystified at the support for MP and the vituperative language towards OB. I can see how MP would be upset to lose some clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue, but how exactly are they harming you the user? 

You have copyright of whatever creative work you produce the moment its produced without having to file anything with the government. It's up to you to enforce it.

You, bryans don't get to decide what is worthy of copyright and what is not. The government did that already. Any creative writing is included, even if you belittle it.

Mountain Project does not own your words when you put them on the site. They ask for a license to use them. You still own the copyright to your creative works.

People do post on the site to reach other climbers. What they object to is having their work copied without attribution. MP is just a means to an end: making sure OpenBeta stops their illegal behavior. It's much easier to ask MP to step in than it is for each person who has felt wronged to go hire a lawyer on their own.

You could have stopped typing right after this:

> I do not at all support the way OB went about scraping data so fast they didn't find a way to credit authors

That's all there is to this situation.

M Mwrote:

We both see things in a similar light. I might add that people who spend countless hours posting up routes on the internet for the entire planet to have for free should really consider writing small and cheap guidebooks instead , self publishing is as easy as it ever has been.

Guidebooks, aka paywalled content! (that's also poorly distributed) Which is exactly what people are worried about MP's future.

But guidebooks are glorified because it's the first way things were done.

I much prefer software that lets me filter and search, play with a map, see other people's opinions and comments, etc. And yes, I'd much prefer to see all this climbing content be truly free. Mountain Project is the best thing we have so far. OpenBeta, TheCrag.com, UKClimbing, etc are websites of a very low quality, both in absolute terms and in comparison to MP. As a software engineer every time I try to use those sites I want to tear my hair out and punch whoever built them, that's how bad they are.

Heliodor Jalbawrote: As a software engineer every time I try to use those sites I want to tear my hair out and punch whoever built them, that's how bad they are.

For what it's worth, in all of these sites, only one let's you volunteer your software development skills to improve the site.

Doing that is far harder than talking about it, of course...

J Lwrote:

For what it's worth, in all of these sites, only one let's you volunteer your software development skills to improve the site.

Doing that is far harder than talking about it, of course...

You're jumping to conclusions. I actually did get curious enough to poke my head in. You can see a few bug reports that I submitted if you look on Github. I chatted with Viet a bunch. I looked at all the systems and products they have in place. My overall conclusion was that the project in its current form with the current mentality of the people involved would be an absolute complete waste of my time to get involved.

djkyotewrote:

When OnX sells out, literally, yall are gunna be thanking OB for protecting the data.

Silicon Valley is absolutely rife with examples of this.

Founder will start a company, genuinely promise with the best of intentions that xyz will remain free or otherwise not be ruined in some manner. 

Company is acquired, founder makes heartfelt blog post about how acquiring company is great, is on board with founder's values, and re-iterates their promise.

After that it's a ticking clock until some VP decides to sunset or paywall to cut costs or earn revenue, respectively.

I'm not at all saying that OnX will do this. I'm also not saying they won't.

Heliodor Jalbawrote:

My overall conclusion was that the project in its current form with the current mentality of the people involved would be an absolute complete waste of my time to get involved.

That's fair. I looked as well and have little experience with React and GraphQL, so it's not the best fit for me either.

For what it's worth, when I said earlier that it's easier said than done, it wasn't meant as a dig at you, I simply meant that it's a rather tall ask to get devs to come into a brand new project and start making changes, and that's even if the language/frameworks align.

But I digress.

bryanswrote:

I do not at all support the way OB went about scraping data so fast they didn't find a way to credit authors, but this still feels like a lot of pearl-clutching going on about people's precious route descriptions. You didn't write a song, or a screenplay, or a patent to cure cancer. You told people where to find and how to most safely climb a chunk of stone you don't own, and at most drilled some metal into, knowing that when you hit "submit" the platform owner would own your words. Didn't you post the route on MP precisely to reach as many people as possible with the littlest effort, and now OB is simply amplifying your intent? If you truly wanted to protect your unique and precious words, why didn't you publish a guide and copyright them instead? I'm sincerely mystified at the support for MP and the vituperative language towards OB. I can see how MP would be upset to lose some clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue, but how exactly are they harming you the user? 

Bryan, you have in the recent past expressed strong emotions about people "stealing" your projects and the idea of someone altering the fixed protection on routes you've FA'd without your permission. So I find it slightly puzzling that you would be so dismissive towards MP contributors' who are upset about having their work scraped and reposted without attribution.

I don't think anyone here is suggesting that they are loyal to OnX or even denying the possibility that OnX may put up a paywall to access the website we helped to build. Many of us would even support an alternative if it promised to be open source and free to access in perpetuity. OpenBeta isn't that, as displayed so obviously by the actions we are discussing here.

Scraping (extraction of underlying HTML content)? I haven’t looked recently at OB. But at the beginning, the content came wholly from MP’s public application programming interface (API) and so not from “scraping”. 

Unless someone knows otherwise, that API probably did not provide names of the contributors. That makes sense to me meaning personal information would be filtered out when passed through MP’s API - at least initially.

I did not see an answer to whether it was complaints from MP Admins that triggered the loss of the API. Still, the API could have instead evolved to include attribution to those willing (assuming names were omitted at the start).

It’s kind of a mess - no?  Many, many Individuals volunteering time to add content. Some wishing that to be freely available. Others not. Desire for attribution. Caring little about attribution. Terms of Use that evolved over time with apparently no clear documented history.

It really should not be OnX’s burden to sort this out.

And I doubt anyone contributing to MP ever thought they’d make money from it or become meaningfully famous in some way.  Nor would there be much control over how it was used - Consider REI’s terms of use, or the history of strong contributors like Dingus Milktoast - now there was a contributor who created and shared intrinsically valuable (potentially) art (e.g., What is a Route aka Old Man by the Fire) ).

People being upset about OB’s content from MP’s contributors seems to me to come out of a naive perspective, and it can only hurt us in the future.

Heliodor Jalbawrote:

Guidebooks, aka paywalled content! (that's also poorly distributed) Which is exactly what people are worried about MP's future.

But guidebooks are glorified because it's the first way things were done.

I much prefer software that lets me filter and search, play with a map, see other people's opinions and comments, etc. And yes, I'd much prefer to see all this climbing content be truly free. Mountain Project is the best thing we have so far. OpenBeta, TheCrag.com, UKClimbing, etc are websites of a very low quality, both in absolute terms and in comparison to MP. As a software engineer every time I try to use those sites I want to tear my hair out and punch whoever built them, that's how bad they are.

Yet guidebooks are highly sought after when at the crag with only the phone to guide one around. I have so many people ask to borrow my book if they see it out as well as pick my brain on routes it is starting to get old! The guidebook for my area is still easily available on the way to the crag yet people with 1000$ in gear spending 30$ a night for camping can't be bothered spending 25$ on a book!

Just last weekend in Canada we had two fairly complete digital guides to work with at a new-to-us crag(out of print book not available) yet it was the book we borrowed at the crag that pointed us to the best line of the trip.

I appreciate both and will share route opinions online but will never again share complete route descriptions on my own time for free unless the local climbers want more traffic. To me, using the internet over trying to support the locals is cheap and definitely on the verge of being unethical. 

M M brings yet another valid perspective that is also practical - favor guide books over web apps. There’s some teeth in that.

Recently received a pdf of a bunch of new routes nearby.They are not on MP. I won’t change that. 

Bill Lawrywrote:

M M brings yet another valid perspective that is also practical - favor guide books over web apps. There’s some teeth in that.

Recently received a pdf of a bunch of new routes nearby.They are not on MP. I won’t change that. 

It's really just my feelings being shared Bill, I now expect more posts to follow on how my feelings are wrong!

Since when did mp respect copyright? Or rephrased, when did it stop? Post REI, pre OnX a bunch of sanctimonious jackals renamed the work of others. The day, your copyright died.

Cherokee Nuneswrote:

Since when did mp respect copyright? Or rephrased, when did it stop? Post REI, pre OnX a bunch of sanctimonious jackals renamed the work of others. The day, your copyright died.

Different thread Cherokee ;), also I don't believe names of routes fall under copyright generally.

To all of the site admins that worked up over this issue, do any of you realize that you are just a bunch of unpaid employees helping to build and maintain a product for a very well funded venture capital firm (summit partners)? I find incredibly sad that anyone would choose spend their precious free time working for a venture backed corporation without any compensation. I don't consider the small dopamine hit one gets from adding a new route or whatever else it is site admins do to be enough compensation/reward. Or that this site is community resource when it is as toxic as any Facebook group.

The only path forward for onX is to reinstate the api and change terms/conditions to CC or something similar so others can use the data to build something better. I do agree that OB overstepped when importing route descriptions, however he does have an argument that stood agains prior litigation and is in the right for moment. I guessing the recent request to OB to remove content is the start of an attempt to shut OB for good.

djkyotewrote:

When OnX sells out, literally, yall are gunna be thanking OB for protecting the data.

At the very least MP pages should be put up on archive.org or archive.ph. If anyone feels protective about their content being plugged into an open-source site, they can at least hedge against that same content being walled off in the future.

MP is already indexed on archive.org, at least partially. I have not done a thorough check. Here is the route that OB uses as their example in the climbing-data repo on Github:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240526044315/ mountainproject.com/route/1…

Hmm MP seems to break that link... maybe if I encode it?

Earlier I said:

if you want to support OB then post your content directly there

Well it seems there is not actually a way to do this. That front-end feature is "coming soon" and the climbing-data repo is just a pile of .zip files, LOL.

To my eyes OB is currently a project for coders, not the climbing community. They track attribution and publicly thank the coders involved... not the actual climbers who created the content their code is displaying. And if you're not a coder, there's not really any way to participate.

I think they could clean this whole situation up quickly simply by clearing the "description" JSON field in the climbing-data repo files. That's where the creative content lives, and every other field is defensible as non-copyrightable facts. And then prioritize the feature for non-coders to add or edit climb descriptions (with attribution), so the climbing community can participate directly.

Don’t mean to heap coals on the heads of the admins - their hearts and volunteered time are in the right place IMO

Just give a thought that your collective wishes do not necessarily represent that of the rest of us non-admin users who do the same. Your actions with respect to this topic have impacted us all. Your views understandably carry a disproportionate weight with OnX. Still, might does not make right.