Effective 2026-03-29
When you submit content to OpenLongTrails (OLT) — such as waypoint locations, descriptions, photos, comments, or other information — you keep ownership of your contributions. You grant OLT a broad license to publish and share your contributions under open licenses, so the data can remain freely available and be contributed to other open projects.
By submitting content to OLT, you grant OpenLongTrails a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sublicense your contributions under any license conformant with the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition, including future additions to the conformant list.
This means OLT may publish your contributions under different open licenses depending on the context. The current default license for the OLT dataset is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
The open data ecosystem uses several different but mutually incompatible licenses. A broad grant constrained to Open Definition-conformant licenses allows OLT to contribute data to other open projects that use different licenses, while ensuring your contributions can never be placed under a proprietary or closed license.
For example, OLT may contribute data to projects such as OpenStreetMap (which uses the Open Database License), Wikidata (which uses CC0), or Wikimedia Commons (which uses CC BY-SA 4.0). These are examples, not an exhaustive list. OLT may contribute to any open project under any Open Definition-conformant license.
The OLT dataset is attributed collectively to "OpenLongTrails contributors." Individual contributions are not attributed separately. By contributing, you agree that this collective attribution satisfies the attribution requirements of CC BY 4.0 and any other applicable license.
You retain full ownership of your contributions. You may continue to use, share, license, or publish your own contributions in any way you choose, including under different terms.
By submitting content, you confirm that:
The license you grant for a contribution cannot be revoked once that contribution is submitted. You may stop contributing at any time, but contributions already made remain licensed under these terms.
This is necessary because contributions become part of a shared dataset that others rely on. Allowing withdrawal of individual contributions would undermine the integrity of the dataset and the projects that use it.
If you believe a contribution infringes a third party's rights, you may submit a notice under the DMCA procedure described in the Terms of Service.
OLT may change the default license under which the dataset is published, provided the new license is listed as conformant with the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition.
OLT may update these contributor terms. Changes are governed by the Terms of Service. Changes to these contributor terms will apply only to contributions made after the update. Contributions made under a previous version remain governed by the version in effect at the time of submission.