OpenBeta is a not-for-profit organization that enables new and innovative uses of data about rock climbing routes. Just as the Access Fund fights on behalf of climbers to keep public lands open to climbing, OpenBeta is dedicated to ensuring free and open access to rock climbing data.

Mountain Project is a website and mobile app described by Rock and Ice magazine as “the largest resource of user-contributed climbing-route information in the world”. Started in 2005, the site now contains details on over 240,000 rock climbing routes across the world. All of this content was contributed by its users, and most of that content is non-copyrightable factual information like names of climbing routes, their GPS coordinates, and the name of the first ascensionist and date of first ascension.

The climbing community gains many benefits with clear and open licensing of climbing data, such as:

• An open system where the climbing community can drive changes to oppressive route names, or restructuring the data to improve current safety information.
• A public dataset which can be utilized by scientists to study the land/wildlife-impact of climbing areas and make suggestions to better preserve these delicate ecologies.
• OpenBeta’s education resources for coders to remix the factual, non-copyrightable data available on Mountain Project such as geographical “heat maps” to show the number of routes in an area or the ability to search for climbs by a specific first ascensionist.

At the end of 2020, Mountain Project’s parent company was acquired by onXmaps. On February 23,  onXmaps sent a cease-and-desist letter and DMCA takedown notice to OpenBeta. As a result, the dataset that OpenBeta’s programs require is now unavailable, and anyone attempting to recreate the dataset from Mountain Project’s website may face similar legal threats from onXmaps. Volumes of crowd-sourced climbing information, created and shared by climbers as a public resource, are now locked into a single platform: MountainProject/onXmaps.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, has written a letter to onXmaps on behalf of OpenBeta, explaining what onXmaps should already know: In the United States, facts are not copyrightable. And according to Mountain Project’s own Terms of Service, the site does not own the non-factual content like photos, comments, and descriptions contributed by users. That content is owned by the users that submitted it.

The EFF has asked onXmaps to withdraw its DMCA complaint against OpenBeta. But even if it does, onXmaps’ legal threat against OpenBeta will dissuade others from attempting to access the Mountain Project data or make similar fair use works. 

This petition asks onXmaps to do three things:

1. Publicly recognize that the user-contributed content on Mountain Project is either non-copyrightable facts or that the copyright is owned by the individual users and not onXmaps/Mountain Project.
2. Update its Terms of Service to state that by contributing content, users are agreeing to license that content via a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike or similar license that explicitly allows anyone to download and re-use this user-contributed data (with reasonable rate limits).
3. Stop sending legal threats to climbers who want to make new innovative uses of the user-contributed data on Mountain Project.