MP v. OB: anyone have feelings to share?

The below message was posted, but the thread was locked. I am re-posting it here where it's not locked so people can discuss the issue. I'm not being ironic or cute, and I fully understand I am undermining the OP's intent, as I disagree with the decision to lock the thread. I have contributed dozens of routes to MP over the years and I have no problem with OB cutting/pasting my words. I understand not everyone feels the same, but surely many of us do, so maybe MP should take into account the opinions of its users, not just its legal and intellectual property teams. I would consider deleting my routes from MP (I know eventually someone else will add them) if MP is going to act like they now own them. Yes I understand there is fine print saying MP owns my words once I submit them, but that is a boilerplate adherence contract that isn't exactly nice or fair or in the spirit of sharing route info with interested parties.

MP Moderators  · 3 hours ago · Unknown Hometown · Joined Dec 2020 · Points: 0

MP Moderators  · 3 hours ago · Unknown Hometown · Joined Dec 2020 · Points: 0

In the interest of transparency, the text of a recent letter to the founder of OpenBeta can be found below. Questions can be directed to support@mountainproject.com.

As the COO of onXmaps, Inc., parent company of the Mountain Project, I am requesting your help in bringing a serious matter to a swift, amicable resolution.

It has come to our attention that your OpenBeta website (openbeta.io) is displaying content scraped from our Mountain Project website (mountainproject.com). The example below, one of many that we found, shows identical language in the description of Powell River in British Columbia.

https://openbeta.io/area/4624f40a-b644-5256-9287-aa19002ce00f/powell-river

https://www.mountainproject.com/area/106189297/powell-river

As you know, the climbing community is a remarkable and engaged group of individuals. Because their lives often depend on it, the climbers of the Mountain Project community–and Mountain Project administrators in particular–have dedicated an incalculable effort to ensuring that content on the Mountain Project website and app is accurate and effective.

When users contribute to the Mountain Project, they retain ownership of that contributed content. Contributors have the right to decide where their content is posted, and they have given Mountain Project a license to display it. This license does not extend to OpenBeta or to any other platform. In fact, various members of the Mountain Project community have shared their opinions on OpenBeta’s use of Mountain Project data here, openbeta.substack.com/p/ope….

Honoring the generous and invaluable contributions from the climbing community, onXmaps has devoted significant resources to curating, administering, and maintaining the Mountain Project website as a free resource for the climbing community. Accordingly, we have protected the content on our website as a database by registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office. A copy of the certificate of registration is attached for your reference.

Although the Mountain Project website is accessible without charge, it does not mean the content is free for the taking. Copying and republishing Mountain Project content without permission violates the copyright protections of both onX and Mountain Project contributors. Furthermore, your scraping of content from our website also violates our terms of use, which can be viewed here, adventureprojects.net/ap-terms. In particular, Section 8(g) states that users who access the website must not “use spiders, crawlers, robots, scrapers, automated tools or any other similar means to access the Service or substantially download, reproduce or archive any portion of the Service.”

We ask that you remove all Mountain Project content from the OpenBeta website and any related websites, databases, apps, or other resources by October 5, 2024. This request includes but is not limited to the descriptions of various locations and climbs. Furthermore, we expect that you will stop violating our terms of service and will immediately cease all efforts to scrape content from any of onXmaps, Inc.’s various websites, including mountainproject.com.

Please note that it is not our intent to shut down your OpenBeta website or otherwise disrupt your business. We simply seek to respect the rights of our contributors, honor the relationship between Mountain Project and its contributors, and protect the value of Mountain Project content.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me. Otherwise, please confirm that you will comply with our requests, and let us know when you expect this work to be completed. If OpenBeta chooses not to address all of our concerns in a timely and complete fashion, onXmaps reserves all rights to resort to any and all legal and practical means to enforce its rights and interests

.

Best Regards,

Joshua Spitzer, COO onXmaps, Inc.

Maybe copy your route descriptions yourself and send them to Open Beta, so they have proof that they didn't scrape them.

Decades of contributions to Mountain Project were made in the spirit of an open-source community resource. I have absolutely no problem with the spirit of the actions taken by OB. OnX is clearly headed towards monetizing the MP database which is a far bigger betrayal in my opinion.

onx definitely doesn't care what we think/want here, I wonder if they'll even honor the request to delete a route since that has to go through an admin

I understand the concerns and frustrations around IP rights, and I see some evidence of good faith attempts from OB maintainers to secure permissions and properly license the data under CC0 after being accused of scraping the data.

I am deeply confused about route authors' beliefs that MP/OnX would be more responsible stewards of their content though. It's sure their data is always inches away from being paywalled or monetized, and there's probably nothing authors could do about it if the company chose to go in that direction.

Open Beta seems like they are cruisin’ for a bruisin’, legally speaking. It’s not enough to just say your project is inspired by open source. Actual open source projects retain counsel, carefully craft their licenses and disclosures, and track content attribution. Open source works by leveraging copyright and licensing, not by violating it.

OB in comparison seems to be scraping content willy-nilly and then putting CC-by-SA in the footer… that’s not how Creative Commons works. You can’t just take content and relicense it based on vibes.

I agree with Rob, if you want to support OB then post your content directly there. There is not really a mechanism to OK what they are doing by posting supportive comments in the MP forum. 

I'm a regional admin for the state of New Mexico and I'm committed to growing the MP database for my state & my climbing community. I did not give permission for route and area descriptions that I wrote to be posted to the OpenBeta's website. 

I strongly take issue with OpenBeta blatantly scraping route description data off Mountain Project. Open source does not mean you get to steal other people's data and post it publicly. Stealing is stealing. This is unacceptable.

I made my >1000 contributions on the MP platform to the climbing community, not to a corporation. I do my regional admin work for the climbing community, not a corporation. Anyone can use my contributions with or without attribution, as long as they are not trying to monetize it.

Clinton Nguyenwrote:

I understand the concerns and frustrations around IP rights, and I see some evidence of good faith attempts from OB maintainers to secure permissions and properly license the data under CC0 after being accused of scraping the data.

It is not an accusation, it is a fact. OpenBeta has a public GitHub repository where they clearly state its contents are "Climbing routes extracted from MountainProject": https://github.com/OpenBeta/climbing-data

But of course they think that by writing a README with headers saying it's a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and footers stamping a Creative Commons CC0 license, they can get off the hook for plagiarism. As James said above, they clearly have no clue how Open Source licensing actually works.

I've been a member and contributor to MP since before it was MP. I've seen it evolve from a pet project started by one of my climbing partners with the purpose of sharing beta and connecting climbers (pre-dating color guidebooks, smart phones, and in the toddler-years of the internet), to going on to change hands multiple times - from individual owners to corporations. OnX owns it now, but MP is still much the same as most of us have known it to be for many years. I have no particular allegiance to OnX - I'm certainly not paid by them - and I'm cynical and always wondering if something sinister lies in wait just around the bend. Though to be honest I've had positive experiences with each and every OnX employee I've interacted with, and overall, I haven't seen any significant negative changes to MP since they took over. 

That said, "OpenBeta" has taken many (all?) of my area and route descriptions and reposted them verbatim without citing my name. I strongly object to this. Seeing words that I wrote and take some degree of pride in, reposted without any attribution, is very disturbing to me. While I don't love the idea of anyone making money off my time, effort, and creativity - especially when my intent is simply to benefit others and exercise my mind, skills, and creativity - so far OnX hasn't done that. Not directly, anyway. If you ask me, OpenBeta can use data (meaning cold facts like route names, grades, pitch counts, etc) all they want to benefit the climbing community - but personally I draw the line at plagiarism. Seeing the shit I wrote - stuff that many, many climbers have thanked me for over the years - just straight up cut-and-pasted is deeply offensive to me. I realize not everyone feels this way (I have respect for those of you who are so altruistic towards the climbing community that you don't care if your contributions are attributed to you or not - or how they're used) but for me my contributions are a creative endeavor. MP has committed to us users the ownership of our contributions; put another way: I own the things I write and I consider OpenBeta's actions theft.

I agree Josh. I draw the line at plagiarism also. For me as a climber, the Mountain Project website has been invaluable in my 10 years of climbing and I willing give back to make the database better. As a New Mexico regional admin, I'm 100% committed to building a resource that supports safe climbing for my New Mexico climbing community. So many contributors in my state have given their time and knowledge to built an amazing database of our state's areas and routes. It's disappointing to see this stolen in the name of the "climbing community". We are the climbing community!

I personally have zero concerns that Mountain Project will ever be anything but free for users.

I support OnX as they try to get this stolen content taken down.

PS: I would rather share the content I contribute on a non-profit site. I suspect, but don't know, that each time MP has been sold to a new owner, the previous owner made a bunch of cash on the transaction. Most of us contributors had nothing to do with the platform, but everything to do with the content, and it is a combination of those two elements that give MP monetary value. 

Putting money in someone else's pocket is not really something I signed up for, but I will concede this: Nowhere else is there such a good/useful platform for climbers to share information. If the cost we must pay to have this resource is to generate some revenue for the owner of MP (whomever that happens to be from year to year), perhaps that's acceptable? 

On the other hand, maybe OpenBeta should focus its energy on creating a platform that is better than MP and then naturally contributors and users alike will gravitate towards it. That might be a win for the "climbing community." But stealing the information from MP (and more specifically, us contributors) to get there is not the way.

1. Your contributions to MP are owned by you, licensed to MP as per their user agreement.

2. Everyone [more or less] agrees that route names and other route data is not the issue. The issue is the creative descriptions and [sometimes] artful/colorful prose written about routes. That's your creative work.

3. You are free to offer your creative work any place you desire...MP, OB, other guidebook authors. MP cannot know your intentions, so it's up to you to distribute your creative work as widely as you desire.

4. OB scraped your creative content from MP, and added it to their database (violation 1), and did so without attribution (violation 2). Whether you would have authorized this use or not, it's offensive to have done so without permission.

5. OB has, so far, refused to admit wrongdoing. I've read their excuses, and have had the founder explain them to me, and they are nonsensical.

6. OB is willing to remove your content when asked, but they require you to provide OB links to every single piece of content they scraped. I've done this...it took me hours, and they got it wrong and it took many exchanges until they got it right. Consider the man-years of effort wasted by the community if we all did this.

7. MP/OnX is stepping up and demanding action by OB for their illegal copying.

I applaud OnX's action to insist that OB take down our content.

Lincoln Mahanwrote:

onx definitely doesn't care what we think/want here

How is it any different from when any of the other corporations owned MP? 

So when is MP/OnX going to take down all the route descriptions ripped from guidebooks without attribution and/or permission? 

I support the mission of Open Beta (copyleft route database) and I acknowledge that scraping the creative works of individuals without their permission is not cool, but it is quite hypocritical for OnX to threaten legal action when their own database is full of plagiarized content.

Israel Rwrote:

…when their own database is full of plagiarized content.

Submitting content like this is against MP’s terms. Instances of this should be reported to regional admins for deletion. Keep in mind there are tens of thousands of route entries and a handful of volunteer admins: we can’t cross reference every new submission with every print guidebook, but I guarantee if you flag it it will be dealt with, and if it’s not, please escalate to another admin.

Absolutely Israel. It sounds like you are intimately familiar with routes that need to be flagged. Have you flagged content and your flag was ignored? 

I have not been flagging the routes I've noticed but I'll start doing so.

My point wasn't about the volunteer labor that goes into maintaining the MP database, it was more so about OnX effectively virtue signalling about Open Beta's abuses without addressing the abuses in their own database. As far as I am aware, they haven't been allocating monetary resources to clean up their own database but they are threatening to use monetary resources (legal action) against Open Beta for the same thing. In my mind, this makes me question their intent; does OnX actually care about the copyright of their contributors or are they just protecting their investment?

I doubt any of the waivers we all signed were that MP would protect our obviously public posts from being used ... publicly.  The one I originally signed did not prevent third parties from using my contributions.  And I'd hoped third parties would - though at the time I was mostly thinking of printed guidebooks.  In this age, a central and freely available database is even better.

The waiver content has varied over the years / decades.  Anyone have a timeline of and copies of the various versions to compare against dates of contributions? Is that information publicly available so third parties are in-the-know so to speak?  I think there is a reason why OnX hasn't charged for access to literally freely given MP contributions.

Monopolies are what is scare-y.  They stifle creativity and can fix their own prices.

;)

If everyone would just oblige to fight club rules none of this would be an issue.

Earn the beta.

MP points mean nothing. 

Israel Rwrote:

I have not been flagging the routes I've noticed but I'll start doing so.

My point wasn't about the volunteer labor that goes into maintaining the MP database, it was more so about OnX effectively virtue signalling about Open Beta's abuses without addressing the abuses in their own database. As far as I am aware, they haven't been allocating monetary resources to clean up their own database but they are threatening to use monetary resources (legal action) against Open Beta for the same thing. In my mind, this makes me question their intent; does OnX actually care about the copyright of their contributors or are they just protecting their investment?

How can OnX address those issues if folks like you see those violations and don’t report them? MP has a very small army of volunteer admins who have control and a strong vote to edit and remove content that doesn’t meet the MP guidelines.

What OnX is doing with OB is to act based on feedback and awareness raised by people (users and admins) who have put time and creative effort in keeping the MP database in as best shape as possible. Basically, it is trying to protect the IP that belongs to contributors but has been granted permission to be displayed on MP.