Name: Free as in Climbing: Rock Climber’s Open Data Project Threatened by Bogus Copyright Claims
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Free as in Climbing: Rock Climber’s Open Data Project Threatened by Bogus Copyright Claims

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItRock climbers have a tradition of sharing “beta”—helpful information about a route—with other climbers. Giving beta is both useful and a form of community-building within this popular sport. Given that strong tradition of sharing, we were disappointed to learn that the owners of an important community website, , were abusing copyright to try to shut down another site . The good news is that OpenBeta’s creator is not backing down—and EFF is standing with him.Viet Nguyen, a climber and coder, created OpenBeta to bring open source software tools to the climbing community. He used Mountain Project, a website where climbers can post information about climbing routes, as a source of user-posted data about climbs, including their location, ratings, route descriptions, and the names of first ascensionists. Using this data, Nguyen created free, publicly available interfaces (APIs) that others can use to discover new insights about climbing—anything from mapping favorite crags to analyzing the relative difficulty of routes in different regions—using software of their own.Rock climbers get a lot of practice at falling hard, taking a moment to recover, and continuing to climb. Mountain Project should take a lesson from their community: dust off, change your approach, and keep climbing.The Mountain Project website is built on users’ contributions of information about climbs. Building on users’ contributions, Mountain Project offers search tools, “classic climbs” lists, climbing news links, and other content. But although the site runs on the contributions of its users, Mountain Project’s owners apparently want to control who can use those contributions, and how. They sent a cease-and-desist letter to Mr. Nguyen, claiming to “own[] all rights and interests in the user-generated work” posted to the site, and demanding that he stop using it in OpenBeta. They also sent a DMCA request to GitHub to take down the OpenBeta code repository.As we explain in our , these copyright claims are absurd. First, climbers who posted their own beta and other information to Mountain Project may be surprised to learn that the website is claiming to “own” their posts, especially since the site’s say just the opposite: “you own Your Content.”As is typical for sites that host user-generated content, Mountain Project doesn’t ask its users to hand over copyright in their posts, but rather to give the site a “non-exclusive” license to use what they posted. Mountain Project’s owners are effectively usurping their users’ rights in order to threaten a community member.And even if Mountain Project had a legal interest in the content, OpenBeta didn’t infringe on it. Facts, like the names and locations of climbing routes, can’t be copyrighted in the first place. And although copyright might apply to climbers’ own route descriptions, OpenBeta’s use is a fair use. As we explained in our letter:The original purpose of the material was to contribute to the general knowledge of the climbing community. The OpenBeta data files do something more: Mr. Nguyen uses it to help others to learn about Machine Learning, making climbing maps, and otherwise using software to generate new insights about rock climbing.In other words, a fair use.Rock climbers get a lot of practice at falling hard, taking a moment to recover, and continuing to climb. Mountain Project blew it here by making legally bogus threats against OpenBeta. We hope they take a lesson from their community: dust off, change your approach, and keep climbing.Share ItA recent District Court decision in . is a for free speech. The Court firmly rejected the argument that copyright law creates a shortcut around the First Amendment’s protections for anonymous critics. In the case, a company tried to...SAN FRANCISCO—The Internet Archive has asked a federal judge to rule in its favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending.The Internet Archive, headquartered in San Francisco, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit library which preserves and provides access to cultural artifacts...Westlaw, the world’s largest legal research service, is very likely to face antitrust liability. A federal court has ruled that ROSS Intelligence, a tiny rival offering new research tools (which Westlaw forced out of business with a copyright infringement suit) could proceed with claims that Westlaw uses exclusionary and anticompetitive...Copyright law cannot be used as a shortcut around the First Amendment’s strong protections for anonymous internet users, a federal trial court ruled on Tuesday.The by a judge in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California confirms that copyright holders issuing subpoenas under the...A new quasi-court for copyright, with nationwide reach, began accepting cases this week. The or “CCB,” housed within the Copyright Office in Washington DC, will rule on private copyright infringement lawsuits from around the country and award damages of up to $30,000 per case. Though it’s...Copyright law and free expression have always been in tension, with the courts protecting speech from overzealous copyright claims using legal doctrines such as fair use. But in 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and since then courts have interpreted its “anti-circumvention” provision to give rightsholders the unprecedented...SAN FRANCISCO—As part of its ongoing work to ensure that people can know and understand the laws they live under, , a nonprofit organization, on Thursday vindicated its ability to publicly post important laws online in standard formats, free of copy protections and cumbersome user interfaces.The win for Public...Anonymous speech is an important protection for those concerned about political or economic retribution, harassment, or even threats to their lives. The shield that protects those speakers’ anonymity in U.S. court is the First Amendment, and applying the appropriate constitutional test during litigation allows a court to appropriately balance the...We live in a world increasingly governed by technology. Too often, that technology includes security vulnerabilities that could allow malicious actors access to our most important and private information. That’s why it’s so important that security researchers be allowed to do their work without fear that they might infringe copyright...Software robots should not be deciding whether your creative content, whether written words, videos, photos, or music, ought to be pulled off the internet.That’s what we told the U.S. Copyright office in arguing against requiring service providers to embrace “standard technical measures” to address...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItRock climbers have a tradition of sharing “beta”—helpful information about a route—with other climbers. Giving beta is both useful and a form of community-building within this popular sport. Given that strong tradition of sharing, we were disappointed to learn that the owners of an important community website, , were abusing copyright to try to shut down another site . The good news is that OpenBeta’s creator is not backing down—and EFF is standing with him.Viet Nguyen, a climber and coder, created OpenBeta to...

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Free as in Climbing: Rock Climber’s Open Data Project Threatened by Bogus Copyright Claims

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