Copyright and License

Hitchmap is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).

You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit Hitchmap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence.

Note: The licensing situation for data from unregistered users and users who registered between January 1, 2022 and July 12, 2026 is muddled. The data is still open in the sense that the database is licensed under the ODBL, but the users have not explicitly given permission to reproduce their reviews. You are responsible for making sure copyright is not violated.

How to credit Hitchmap

Where you use Hitchmap data, you are required to do the following two things:

• Provide credit to Hitchmap by displaying our copyright notice.
• Make clear that the data is available under the Open Database License.

For the copyright notice, we have different requirements on how this should be displayed, depending on how you are using our data. For example, different rules apply on how to show the copyright notice depending on whether you have created a browsable map, a printed map or a static image. This the key part from the ODBL license:

[I]f you Publicly Use a Produced Work, You must include a notice associated with the Produced Work reasonably calculated to make any Person that uses, views, accesses, interacts with, or is otherwise exposed to the Produced Work aware that Content was obtained from the Database, Derivative Database, or the Database as part of a Collective Database, and that it is available under this License.

In plain English: anyone who sees our data must know the data is ours. If you display the data on a map, you should put a copyright notice on top of that map. Putting the attribution behind an information icon or a menu does not constitute sufficient attribution.

How to credit Hitchmap contributors

This section describes how to attribute individual Hitchmap contributors when displaying reviews, which mainly relates to copyright. These requirements are separate from the ODbL attribution requirements described above, which mainly relate to the Hitchmap website's database rights.

On July 12 2026, the following checkbox was added to the registration page:

I understand I retain copyright of all of my reviews. Other platforms may show my reviews if proper attribution is provided.

When you show a review by a Hitchmap contributor who registered after this date, show their nickname (found in points.nickname in the sqlite dump) or their username (id found in points.user_id, username found in user.username) followed by " (Hitchmap)". An example is "Bob (Hitchmap)". Show this string directly above or below the review. If the review is shown in a digital context, the word "Hitchmap" should link to their Hitchmap user page at e.g. https://hitchmap.com/account/Bob. The final result should look like:

Bob (Hitchmap)

Hitchmap should clearly be a link. Nothing else in "Bob (Hitchmap)" should be a link. No part of the attribution can be disemphasized (e.g. in color or size) compared to the surrounding content.

Users who registered before July 13, 2026 did not agree to allow their reviews to be reproduced on other platforms. Unregistered users did not agree either, regardless of their review date. In these cases, you have the legal obligation to obtain a license from users before showing their reviews.

Unless a user allows you attribute them in another way, follow the above attribution guidelines.

Other data in the database

Data from before 2022 originates from Hitchwiki. Check their license pages on how to provide proper attribution there.

Copyright Infringement

Hitchmap contributors are reminded never to add data from any copyrighted sources without explicit permission from the copyright holders.

If you believe that copyrighted material has been inappropriately added to the Hitchmap database, please contact us directly through our website.