Free as in Climbing: Open Data Project Threatened by Bogus Copyright Claims

We are now in an era where copyright laws do not promote the progress of the science and the arts. They merely serve as protectionism from competition and criticism.

As a UKian, I'm not sure that the intellectual property landscape is the same over here as it is in the USA.

I don't know much about MountainProject (beyond going to their website). But I am a rock climber and Alpinist, and I contribute to a UK equivelent of MountainProject, UK Climbing, as moderator for a couple of crags - I basically act as an editor to ensure user-supplied information is correct. While UKClimbing is owned and run by a commercial entity [Rockfax], there is a huge community and a lot of goodwill.

I have to say that from what I have read, openBeta appears not to be acting fairly. As far as I am aware, they have scraped the MountainProject website, and are now presenting the data without any attribution. Did they even ask MountainProect whether it would be OK to use their data?

For me, I contribute to a community, and I am happy and glad that people find what I do useful. But I'd be well p*ssed off if some internet random started scraping the data without asking, and without engaging with the community.

I've been using Mountain Project for over a decade now. The site made a turn for the worse when it was acquired by REI, and then improved again when REI decided it wasn't worth it for them and handed ownership back over to the founder. onX has now owned Mountain Project since January, so this is likely originating with them.

Woah, MountainProject is a owned by REI. I wouldn't have expected this from them.

I wonder if any of the OpenBeta/etc data is in OpenStreetMap.

It seems to happen quite often that online communities spring up when one person happens to start a forum or wiki (and/or write a custom website) around their hobby. Usually it becomes popular by being first/better/through random chance. But then these online communities grow while the site is still owned and run by whoever founded it and it seems not great to have basically a random unelected dictator running it. There can be other problems too, e.g. popular websites can be expensive to run, especially if you have a lot of images.

It often seems to play out in one of a few ways:

- the owner continues running the site benevolently and never gets bored or dies. Maybe the site runs ads or has a donate button for funding the site.

- some company offers the owner a large amount of money for the site. The owner is happy to get paid and not need to manage the site anymore. The company will try to extract that money out of the community through unpleasant commercialisation while not caring much about the community itself. Likely includes a redesign and potentially deleting a load of old content because it doesn’t fit the new database schema. Needless to say the original community might not like this but the owning company will probably be trying to bring in more new visitors and won’t care.

- some very relevant company buys the site. E.g. a car manufacturer buying a forum of owners of their cars. This is similar to the above but the company will likely care more about the community and less about monetisation. However moderation may change and posts critical of the new owners may mysteriously disappear.

- some similar company (eg a magazine about the same topic) buys the community. This would probably be somewhere between the two above. The magazine wants to turn a profit but they hopefully care about the community too.

- some company or charity already representing some of the community acquires the site. For example in this case it could be a big national climbing or mountaineering club. How well this goes probably depends a lot on the company. E.g. if they are also selling guidebooks, they might not like it if the community risks reducing their sales. If the club just run eg huts or offer a life insurance policy or safety training or instructor certification it might be different. And maybe the club will care about their own members more than the acquired community.

- the owner helps set up some small foundation to control the site. This feels like it could go well and likely to have the interests of the site aligned with those of its users. But funding the site could still be a challenge. And the board in control is likely to be made up of the kind of people who want positions on boards, which might not lead to the best results. Perhaps one model of funding involves having relevant companies (eg gear manufacturers who want to encourage people to go climbing and therefore want to buy gear) pay to sponsor the site and in return get someone to sit on the board though this feels like it has some risks too.

I quite like the last (and first) option but it doesn’t seem like a natural path from starting a site to setting up a foundation whereas it seems quite easy to accept an offer from some company who want to buy your website.