Dear Sir or Madame,

I am one of the editors of Wikipedia, free online encyclopaedia. I am writting to you regarding your permission you once granted to us to make use of your online-maps from the examples gallery (your correspondence is here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Demis_Best%C3%A4tigung.gif)

I take the liberty to write to you again because from your correspondence it is not clear enough to me if you understood the Wikipedia's free content policy. All materials published in the Wikipedia must be freely available to anyone (not only Wikipedia!) for use for any purpose (also commercial) and also permission must be granted to anyone to make all kind of derivation works based on Wikipedia's content.

Your previous correspondence has been understood as revoking all copyright to the images we can pull from your maps (except those maps you restricted, i. e. ReefBase) - and in fact, many such images are currently in use on Wikipedia with the information that there are absolutely no restrictions to their reusing and modifications.

We published such images in good faith, because your correspondence was understood in that way by one of our fellow editors. However, because you didn't directly state your permission for unrestricted use of such images by anyone (also outside of Wikipedia), in particular unrestricted commercial use and any kind of modification of such images, I am writing to you again to confirm your consent. Please state directly if you agree that we publish images derived from your maps on such conditions.

Note that although the Wikipedia policy requires the above conditions to be met unexeptionally (otherwise we can't publish a work), it also leaves the creators some options to protect their moral rights. One of such options is to publish a work under the the GNU Free Documentation License (you can find the full text here: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html In particular, this license allows anyone unresticted use and modifaction (as I desribed above) but also requires that the work and all derivations are clearly attributed to the original creator. Furthermore, all derivations of a work licensed under GNU are authomatically also licensed under GNU.

Once again, in order to avoid all misunderstandings, please state directly that you give us permission to publish the images of your maps (GIF, JPG, SVG etc.) under the above mentioned conditions (or the GNU License - if you wish to impose the obligation on anyone to make an attribution to you).

Sincerely yours,

Radoslaw Botev

Dear Radoslaw,

The Wikipedia policy is not the responsibility of Demis, so our understanding of the policy is not relevant. Nor does the policy as stated take into account the rights of the sources from which the world map demo is compiled. It is up to Wikipedia to decide what you do with it and not up to us. We just provide a free service for web users.

As you noted from our previous response, we state that the world map demo data that we freely serve through the OpenGIS protocol is considered public domain, because we only used public domain sources (see http://www2.demis.nl/mapserver/DataSrc.htm). For prepapring the map compilation we do not claim any copyright at all.

On the bottom of the above page we clearly state that users can freely copy the images produced by the Demis Map Server world map demo. This is the statement we can provide and doesn't infringe on the rights of sources we have used. It is up to Wikipedia to decide what you want with the images available from the World Map Demo. In our opinion this is a service and not a "work",

Since we provide the images live, we do reserve the right to to cut off any IP adress that is generating too much traffic (e.g. robots downloading the world at the highest resolution). Also the statement only applies to our world map demo and not to other web sites based on the Demis Web Map Server that we produce for our clients, such as Reefbase.

Kind regards,

Poul Grashoff