Anthony writes:
> Come to think of it, forking under GFDL 1.3 would probably be the most
> appropriate. Then, since Wikipedia intends to dual-license new
> content, new
> Wikipedia content could be incorporated into the fork, but new forked
> content couldn't be incorporated into Wikipedia.
You haven't reviewed the FAQ. As Richard Stallman explains, CC-BY-SA-
only changes, including imports from external sources, will bind
Wikipedia and re-users of Wikipedia content.
That said, I look forward to your fork. Why wait? Why don't you start
now? You clearly are dissatisfied with Wikipedia's implementation of
GFDL as well as Wikipedia's proposed use of CC-BY-SA. It should be
easy, since you throw around the word "fork" so easily. You could
probably squash us even more effectively than Citizendium and Knol have.
(BTW, one benefit of the licensing proposal is that it will be easier
for Wikipedia and Citizendium to cross-fertilize each other.)
> "A free encyclopedia without the plagiarism" would be a better slogan,
> though I'm sure a little thought could produce an even better one.
You are a marketing genius.
> Depends on the traffic. Pure hard drive space is relatively cheap.
> More
> traffic would lead to more expense, but it'd also likely lead to more
> donations.
You obviously have this all figured out. I can't wait to see your fork.
--Mike
Anthony writes:
>> So, online but on a different server is okay, but online when there's
>> an offline copy isn't?
>
>
> Online when there's an offline copy clearly isn't okay.
Clearly because you have a legal right that distinguishes between
online copies and offline copies? Please explain. (Once again, I'm
asking about legal rights because you claim to be basing your
objections on your rights.)
>> What is the legal distinction you're drawing
>> here? (I ask for the "legal distinction" because you are articulating
>> your concern in terms of what you purport to be violations of your
>> legal rights.)
>>
>
> Actually, I'm purporting them to be violations of my moral rights.
How are you distinguishing between "moral rights" and "legal rights"?
A moral right is a kind of legal right, in those jurisdictions that
recognize moral rights.
> But the
> distinction is pretty obvious - in one case the page is a click
> away, in the
> other case it at least requires finding internet access and typing
> in a url,
> and quite possibly requires jumping through even more hoops than that.
So if you were unhappy that your attribution was at the back of a
book, because a reader has to turn to the end and read through a lot
of small print in order to find your name, that would give you a basis
for objecting to that form of attribution?
> Additionally, printed copies will almost surely last longer than the
> url
> remains accessible. With online copies, the url can be updated if
> it moves,
> or the page can be copied to the local server if the remote one goes
> down.
Thank you for articulating an advantage to using URLs. The advantage
of course applies both to online and offline copies.
>> But an online attribution on a separate page (or server) when the
>> article is offline is *not*
>> "direct"? What is the legal (or "rights") basis for this
>> distinction?
>
> Common sense?
So you're saying your legal rights are defined by "common sense"? Are
you sure that's the direction in which you want to take your argument?
--Mike
We're wrapping up the survey in most languages today. According to
statistics which I have not validated, we have received more than
115,000 questionnaires. I'm very pleased by this high response rate,
which bodes well for future surveys.
We expect first results to be published within the next eight weeks.
We've learned a lot through this process, and I am very grateful for
all the help and feedback, and of course for everyone who took the
time to go through the survey and forgave its imperfections. We'll try
to take all feedback into account as we begin interpreting the
results.
The following languages will continue running for a week or two
because they had a late launch or a low response rate:
Chinese (Simplified /Traditional)
Japanese
Afrikaans
Bahasa Indonesia
Greek
Esperanto
Thanks again for all help,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
> Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:58:31 -0800
> From: Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
> To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <55AA3395-EC88-4EC2-8D36-EFDA1967A839(a)wikimedia.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>
> geni writes:
>
>>> (BTW, one benefit of the licensing proposal is that it will be easier
>>> for Wikipedia and Citizendium to cross-fertilize each other.)
>>
>> Nope. The "to clarify that attribution via reference to page histories
>> is acceptable if there are more than five authors." bit will mean that
>> it is imposable for wikipedia to take content from Citizendium without
>> Citizendium adopting some very strange TOS specifically for the
>> benefit of wikipedia which I would rather doubt it would do. Even that
>> would not make it possible to copy content on Citizendium to wikipedia
>> at the moment were the 5 names +URL proposal to be enacted.
>
> I don't regard the 5 names+URL implementation proposal to be written
> in stone. We might choose to modify it (by, e.g., increasing the
> number of names, or allowing editors who insist on being listed to be
> listed) based on feedback here and elsewhere. But the aspect of the
> license update has always been to maximize the extent to which
> Wikipedia can import and export CC-BY-SA-licensed content. Citizendium
> uses a CC-BY-SA 3.0 (unported) license already. Presumably Citizendium
> wants both to import and export CC-BY-SA content. Any implementation
> by us that would require us to ask Citizendium for some kind of
> exemption -- which I agree would be unlikely -- is out of the question.
May I repeat: It is the right of the author and only of the author to
choose the way the attribution is made according the CC-BY-SA license.
"You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a),
keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable
to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original
Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or (ii) if the
Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties
(e.g. a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution
("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of
service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or
parties; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably
practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor
specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not
refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work;
and, consistent with Section 3(b) in the case of a Derivative Work, a
credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work (e.g.,
"French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay
based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by
this Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner"
The original Author/Licensor has to designate an attribution party and
to specify an URI as attribution.
His decision has to be respected by Wikipedia absolutely. This means:
If Wikipedia wants to import "standard" CC-BY-SA content with the name
of the author as attribution scheme it is NOT possible to apply the 5
authors rule for this content. Author's name has to be mentioned even
if 1000 other contributors work on the Wikipedia article - not for
eternity but 70 years after his death.
In this case re-users cannot choose the link-to-a-name-list-rule.
If such imported authors have special conditions - why not give them
to all Wikipedia contributors?
Klaus Graf
geni writes:
> In any case vagueness has it's uses since any attempt to try and
> define everything will tend to result in the license either failing
> or behaving in a very unhelpful manner under certain conditions.
I like to think Kurt Gödel had some important observations in this
regard.
One of the things I see as a lawyer and as a student in philosophy is
the attempt in the GFDL to cover every possible use case with
specificity -- this effort is not wholly incomparable to the effort to
explain all of mathematics in terms of logic and set theory.
--Mike
Chad writes:
> I'm not the one to decide, nor do I have particularly strong feelings
> about one method of attribution or another. Just thought I'd lay the
> blame for this mess where it belongs: a vaguely worded license
> with highly debatable terms.
Without defending the particulars of CC's phrasing, which I think has
its problems but which I also think is better than you allow for here,
I'll offer my opinion that a license a license without any vagueness
or debatable terms is such a rarity that I don't think I've ever seen
one.
--Mike
Thomas Dalton writes:
>> So, online but on a different server is okay, but online when there's
>> an offline copy isn't? What is the legal distinction you're drawing
>> here? (I ask for the "legal distinction" because you are articulating
>> your concern in terms of what you purport to be violations of your
>> legal rights.)
>
> It all boils down to how you define "reasonable", and that's usually
> left to laymen, not lawyers.
If Anthony used the word "reasonable" in relation to this distinction,
I missed it. In any case, it's not forbidden for lawyers to have
intuitions about what is reasonable. In general, lawyers have the same
prerogatives as laymen in this regard.
--Mike
Anthony writes:
> The credit should be part of the
> work itself, not external to the work.
This is a very odd notion, and I find nothing in the language of any
free license that supports it. Freely licensed photos, for example,
don't have to have the attribution as "part of" the photo. Freely
licensed texts don't require that attribution occur *within* the text
proper -- it can occur at the beginning or the end. (You can imagine
how much more difficult a software manual would be to use if
attribution had to occur right next to the incorporated text.) The
whole notion that attribution is required "part of the [substantive]
work itself" rather than adjacent to it, or easily reachable from it,
is your invention, and, in my view, not a requirement of the language
of free licenses.
We honor free licenses by making it possible to determine the
provenance of a work, not by making attribution part of the work
itself. Nor has the notion of attribution ever been meant to be
understood rigidly. As Richard Stallman says in his letter regarding
the point-release change to GFDL: "We have never asserted that we will
not change our licenses, or that we will never make changes like this
one. Rather, our commitment is that our changes to a license will
stick to the spirit of that license, and will uphold the purposes for
which we wrote it."
Stallman also says this: "We did this to allow those sites [such as
Wikipedia] to make their licenses compatible with other large
collections of copylefted material that they want to cooperate with."
The ultimate question has to be whether we truly believe Wikipedia and
other Wikimedia projects really do aim to make it easier to spread
free knowledge throughout the world -- there is a general
acknowledgement that the particulars of the GFDL may make it hard for
the projects to do this, and that is why FSF decided to allow the
opportunity for dual-licensing of Wikipedia content under GFDL 1.3 and
a particular subset of CC-BY-SA -- both requires attribution but
acknowledge that massive collaborative projects raise special problems
in balancing the need for attribution against the need to share free
knowledge. If the former is ultimately seen as more important than
the latter -- which is apparently your view, Anthony -- then we're
scarcely better off under a free license than we were under the "all
rights reserved" regime of traditional copyright.
I think Stallman's approach of sticking to the spirit of free licenses
is the right attitude to have. Otherwise we stick to the letter of
your requirement, Anthony, and lose the spirit altogether.
--Mike
Anthony writes:
> I can believe that you'd focus on such drivel rather than respond to
> the
> actual issues raised.
I try to focus *both* on your drivel *and* on the issues you raise. I
figure you wouldn't be so extreme in what you post if you didn't want
me to focus on it too. Am I mistaken?
> Grow up, Mike.
Too late. At my advanced age, I take my fun where I can find it.
I think you and I both know that your whole business of saying there
are "over 100" versions of CC-BY-SA was an attempt to try to create
ambiguity and anxiety when there isn't really any. The computer
industry used to refer to this as FUD -- the spreading of Fear,
Uncertainty, and Doubt. My reaction to FUD is normally to have fun
with the FUD-spreaders.
--Mike
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> Austin Hair wrote:
>>
>>> Every chapter has unique
>>> considerations specific to its social and political circumstances—be
>>> it Taiwan, Serbia, Hong Kong, or New York City—but, as far as we're
>>> concerned, there's no such thing as a second-class chapter.
>>>
>>
>> Speaking only for myself as one board member among many, I agree with
>> Austin completely. There can be "subnational chapters" - meaning that
>> the chapter is concentrated on a region smaller than a nation-state, but
>> they are not 'sub-chapters'.
>>
>> The New York City metropolitan area:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
>>
>> has 18.8 million people.
>>
>> This is slightly larger than the Netherlands:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands
>>
>> at 16.4 million.
>>
>> The world is not necessarily carved up geopolitically in a manner that
>> would make it at all make sense to declare one nation/one chapter.
>>
>>
Wow!, just wow. Would you be okay with one country that was
very tiny having two chapters?
>> It's a subtle matter with many factors that have to be thoughtfully
>> balanced.
>>
>> --Jimbo
>>
This has to be correct, but I really wonder... can they be.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen