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mledoze / countries

World countries in JSON, CSV, XML and Yaml. Any help is welcome!
https://mledoze.github.io/countries/
Open Data Commons Open Database License v1.0
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Flag/map licensing #454

Closed hyandell closed 1 year ago

hyandell commented 2 years ago

Hi Mohammed,

I'm unsure what the flag/map licensing is. ODBL is a bit unusual for, at least, images.

I noticed in https://github.com/mledoze/countries/issues/340 that the flag came from https://github.com/apilayer/restcountries

That project appears to be under the MPL-2.0 license. Are the flags all under MPL-2.0? Is the map data also from there?

mledoze commented 1 year ago

This is a tricky subject, I'm not proficient in licensing. As far as I know all flags come from Wikipedia, so they should have the same license.

hyandell commented 1 year ago

Thanks - flags being more complicated than most ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_on_emblems is a document on the subject; and as you dig deeper you find warnings like this "This image shows a flag, a coat of arms, a seal or some other official insignia. The use of such symbols is restricted in many countries. These restrictions are independent of the copyright status."

My suggestion is to link back to Wikipedia here, both to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_on_emblems and to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_sovereign_state_flags

(I know you say "The rest comes from Wikipedia" but I'll admit that wasn't something I picked up on and felt comfortable related to the flag images)

mledoze commented 1 year ago

My suggestion is to link back to Wikipedia here, both to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_on_emblems and to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_sovereign_state_flags

Thanks for the suggestion, I will add that to the readme.