A story with a happy ending, read the update at the end.

Today FMTech published a map of the proposed undersea cables intended to connect South Africa to the rest of the world. Its obviously the same map created, and shared by Steve Song at Many Possibilities under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. That means of course that FMTech, and anyone else, is free to reproduce it on their site, provided that they comply with the Creative Commons licence,.

All that the licence requires is that the work should be attributed as required by the creator, in this case a link back to relevant page on Steve’s blog. At the time of writing that isn’t what FMTech has done. Instead the map states “Source: Vodacom”.

Lets give FMTech the benefit of the doubt for now. It seems, without more information that they probably received the map from someone at Vodacom who has not only deleted the attribution required but is now effectively claiming authorship of the map.

The original is under an attribution licence, so whoever has reworked it is permitted to do so,
provided that she attributes the original author,
she is entitled to claim co-authorship of the derivative work,
provided that she attributes the original author,
she is even entitled to claim copyright in the derivative work
provided (you guessed it) that she attributes the original author.

The failure to attribute is a problem for a number of reasons:
Steve Song won’t receive the acknowledgement due to him, and the traffic to his blog to which he is entitled by virtue of making the map available,
users who see the image won’t be enabled to find the original which they can freely re-use under the CC By licence,
and the Creative Commons licence isn’t being honoured.

Right after I finish this post I’m going to alert FMTech to the problem. I have every reason to expect them to give proper attribution once they know the facts.

UPDATE:
I posted this at 17h34 today. By 18:39, the editor of FMTech had corrected the error in response to comments by Steve and myself on the article and posted this message:

“Hi Steve,

Thanks for the post. I’ve looked into it, and checked out the original Vodacom slides, and they do credit your website, albeit in very tiny print. So it was an oversight on our side and for that I apologise. I have fixed the image now, so that it clearly credits you and gives a link to your website. I have also created a click-through so hopefully you’ll get some traffic as well.

Take care and please keep reading.”

Well its nice to be right about FMTech that they wouldn’t deliberately fail to attribute, and its nice to be wrong about Vodacom