UKH

Morning all, and in case you're wondering, no, I'm not on planning on writing a guide but have always wondered: 

IF you write a guide, how to you get the info? Surely you can't just copy it from the older guides, but If the information is already there it you can't just ignore it. I know nowt about this sort of thing so couldn't figure out if it was possible or some kind of plagiarism or sommat. Maybe you just put in a reference to the old guide at the end?

I know guides have been written for years but U guess I've just never thought about it.

Some information is 'public'. For example, the ordnance survey owns their style of mapping and their data, but everyone knows there is a place called Manchester and all the road names in and around Manchester and that it has a particular longitude and latitude. As such anyone can make their own map of Manchester as long as they use their own survey.

It's the same with guides. The authors of previous guides didn't invent the crag or name all the routes our give the grades. These are public information. Therefore as long as the new guide writer does their own research and writing and imagery, they can write their own guide.

Does that mean they can use the route descriptions too?

Obviously a lot of the more recent guides have tended to go away from route descriptions and tend towards photo topos but I sometimes its nice to have the description there.

I'm presuming it would be  a bugger of a job if a writer had to go through every description and change the wording.

I think the CC and Rockfax had a dust up over this. I am sure Alan James can give you chapter and verse, it must be his specialist subject.

Definitely not. These are copyright to each guidebook author. A new guide would have to describe the climb in their own words. 

Monk is correct in that facts like a crag name, route name and first ascensionist info are generally considered to be information that anyone can, and should, be able to use in a new guide. 

Grades and star ratings are not the same since they are more subjective and part of a guidebook writer's job should be to assess these and put a personal slant on them. 

The actual text of route descriptions belongs to whoever wrote it, however the information in the text probably falls into the former fact category. ie. if you re-write a description in your own words then that belongs to you although it isn't good practice. Obviously there are only so many ways you can write 'Climb the crack' though.

Photo-topos and drawn-topos obviously belong to the person who created them and this effort is the most time-consuming part of guidebook writing these days. The positional information of the the lines of a routes they cover is less clear. Anybody can take a crag photo, but then drawing lines on based exclusively on someone else's topo is at best bad practice and would almost certainly contravene copyright if done on a large scale. 

Our approach at Rockfax is that we claim no copyright over the basic information on routes, including grades, stars, description information, first ascent which is why we display them publicly on the UKC logbook system. They are there for the climbing community to use and that includes other guidebook writers. The descriptions do have '©Rockfax' after them in some places - this is to indicate that is where the description comes from and the © relates only to the actual words used.

When writing a guidebook you should use all available sources of information, credit them properly after use, and try and improve on what has gone before by making it more accurate, up-to-date and inspiring. If an author is worrying about what they are copying then they probably aren't doing that.

Alan

Interesting. I wonder how much route descriptions have to vary / be the same to be covered by copyright.

Take an example: Cenotaph Corner. There are are three important things you need to tell a guidebook reader, and one less important thing:
1. It's the big corner in the middle of the crag

2. The grade (E1 5c)

3. It's really good (a 3 star route!)

4. (Less important). The hard bit is at the top

 As climbers, we have a common language we use to describe things. We all know about corners, aretes, walls, slabs and the crux (deliberately didn't use that word in (4). We have a shared language to describe difficulty (a grading system), and a shared language to describe quality (and I guess an underlying that a shared notion of what gives quality to a route).

So I'm not sure how many different descriptions of Cenotaph Corner could exist, and how different / similar they would have to be to fall under copyright. 

But then again, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the prose in many guidebooks can be an art-form in itself. Anyone remember the old North Devon guide with it's description of Henna Cliff: "Situated conveniently close to Morewenstow graveyard...". You'd be pretty upset if someone copied that!

Steve

It was with the BMC in 2001, although there had been a smaller skirmish with the CC in 1995 but that never really got into copyright/legal issues.

My reflection on that incident is here - https://www.rockfax.com/news/2007/11/08/reflections-on-the-guidebook-debate...

Alan

The situation is pretty much as you say. Copying descriptions that provide a degree of interpretation is clearly not allowed, but there are only so many ways you can describe a crack or slab. E.g. "use your finest jamming skills to climb the obvious greasy crack" would be copyright but it would be much harder to claim copyright for "climb the crack".

Yes it does, but IMO it's worth doing even if you're just doing a new edition of the guide for the same publisher. It makes you think about the route and the information you are trying to impart, and also makes it less likely that you'll perpetuate wrong information. Climbing all the routes as well would be the ideal, but depending on crag/ability is likely to be impossible!

One of the crags I wrote for the last Yorkshire grit guides I rewrote every description, and doing so led to the correction of a "left" that had appeared in every previous edition, to the "right" that describes the actual line.

Do you own the copyright for the crag and route descriptions added by UKC users? (I've always wondered)

 In theory the original author retains copyright by default unless there is a contract with the publisher to transfer copyright to them. I can't remember what t&cs we all signed up to on ukc though! 

No, and we wouldn't dream of claiming anything like that. As I said, we regard everything on UKC as available for the climbing community including other guidebook writers. I haven't gone through the process of getting a Creative Commons licence but looked into it and will sort it one day.

That said, if someone produced a guidebook copying Rockfax route descriptions word for word, or UKC-user route descriptions word for word, then I would be annoyed, however this would more be because that would be incredibly lazy guidebook writing.

I do get annoyed when some club guidebook producers ignore UKC Logbooks in the acknowledgment  pages of their books when they quite obviously make extensive use of it. 

Alan

This is a delicate issue.  The sardonic old distinction between plagiarism (one source) and research (two sources) may be relevant.  In the darker corners of Highland hostelries frequented by climbers you might possibly pick up rumours that historically at least two cases of this sort in Scotland, one relating to climbing guides and one to walking guides, brought the interested parties to the brink of legal action.  Discretion (aka cowardice, combined with financial insecurity) forbids that I should name any of the names that are sometimes mentioned in this context.

As author of a couple of walking guides myself, I've become cheerfully accustomed to recognising, in other later publications covering the same ground, chunks of unattributed text that seem disconcertingly familiar ... another old saw, the one about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, has to serve for consolation.

Is there a difference between "description information", "description" and "actual words used in a description"? I'm not quite understanding the difference between your first and second sentences above.

This makes sense to me if it has been the guidebook author who has come up with the words. But many descriptions come direct from the FA. For example, Mick Fowler goes and does several adventurous HXS lines on Hoy. I really would not expect the guidebook author to reclimb the routes simply so they can write their own descriptions of them. In all likelihood they are going to take Mick at his word and use the original descriptions provided by him. In my eyes these should be 'copyright Fowler', not who-ever the guidebook author may be.

Well getting a creative commons licence is as easy as it gets - declare that ukc is provoding the information und the conditions of a cc licence and inlude the sign on the crag pages. preferably cc-by, if you want the souce to be attributed by other users. 

By 'description information' I mean the information contained in a description telling you the routes goes. That information can be stated in a number of different ways but essentially they all say the same thing.

The route goes up the corner then moves left around the roof.
Start up the corner and, at the top move, leftwards around the overhang.

 - Description information the same, text different.

If people want to use UKC/Rockfax databases and books to find out where routes go and then re-write them with their own words then we obviously have no problem with this as long as it isn't done on an industrial scale. If they want to cut and paste the actual text and use this then that would be copying.

Alan

This is an important point. It is true that FA description copyright does remain with the FA no matter where it is published (unless they sign it over). In most cases FAs are perfectly happy for it to be reproduced verbatim in a guidebook however some aren't. I haven't met a guidebook publisher who claims anything different on this one.

However, in my experience it isn't always a good idea to publish FAs description word for word as they wrote them. Firstly, they tend to be too long and over-hyped, and secondly, everyone writes in a different style and consistency through a book is important. This has happened in some guidebooks in the past and you also start getting problems when other new routes are established and then the routes don't relate to each other in a logical and correct order any more. Also, a climbing era has a definite text style. I often find myself re-writing my own route descriptions from 20 years ago for routes which haven't really changed simply because the style of text we include in the books has changed. 

Alan

I see what you're getting at - changing the words in a description into a slightly different order or using different words which mean the same thing (which can be done without having to climb the route). OK I suppose, though apart from cleaning up the writing style and any grammatical errors etc (if applicable), since it is really the same thing it's hard to see any advantage of doing the above other than to avoid claims of copying.

Well you might be standardising a style but, yes, I see your point.

Although perhaps we should be honest here and acknowledge that from time to time when trying to document thousands of routes, we occasionally end up near publication with a question about where a certain route actually goes. In these instances I would suggest that resorting to a route line or paraphrased description from somewhere else is forgivable. As I said, use and credit all available sources but make sure that overall you add to the legacy of information.

Alan