Rob Speer wrote:

> The result of this, by the way, is that commercial entities sell modified
> versions of Wikidata with impunity. It undermines the terms of other
> resources such as DBPedia, which also contains facts extracted from
> Wikipedia and respects its Share-Alike terms. Why would anyone use DBPedia
> and have to agree to share alike, when they can get similar data from
> Wikidata which promises them it's CC-0?

The comparison to DBpedia is interesting: the terms for DBpedia state

"Attribution in this case means keep DBpedia URIs visible and active through at least one (preferably all) of @href, <link />, or "Link:". If live links are impossible (e.g., when printed on paper), a textual blurb-based attribution is acceptable."

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/terms-imprint

So according to these terms, when someone displays data from DBpedia, it is entirely sufficient to attribute DBpedia.

What that means is that DBpedia follows exactly the same theory as Wikidata: it is OK to extract data from Wikipedia and republish it as your own dataset under your own copyright without requiring attribution to the original source of the extraction.

(A bit more problematic might be the fact that DBpedia also republishes whole paragraphs of Text under these terms, but that's another story)

My understanding is that all that Wikidata has extracted from Wikipedia is non-copyrightable in the first place and thus republishing it under a different license (or, as in the case of DBpedia for simple triples, with a different attribution) is legally sound.

If there is disagreement with that, I would be interested which content exactly is considered to be under copyright and where license has not been followed on Wikidata.

For completion: the discussion is going on in parallel on the Wikidata project chat and in Phabricator:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193728#4212728

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Wikipedia_and_other_Wikimedia_projects

I would appreciate if we could keep the discussion in a single place.

Gnom1 on Phabricator has offered to actually answer legal questions, but we need to come up with the questions that we want to ask. If it should be, for example, as Rob Speer states on the bug, "has the copyright of interwiki links been breached by having them be moved to Wikidata?", I'd be quite happy with that question - if that's the disagreement, let us ask Legal help and see if my understanding or yours is correct.

Does this sound like a reasonable question? Or which other question would you like to ask instead?

On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 4:15 PM Rob Speer <rob@luminoso.com> wrote:

> As always, copyright is predatory. As we can prove that copyright is the
enemy of science and knowledge

Well, this kind of gets to the heart of the issue, doesn't it.

I support the Creative Commons license, including the share-alike term,
which requires copyright in order to work, and I've contributed to multiple
Wikimedia projects with the understanding that my work would be protected
by CC-By-SA.

Wikidata is engaged in a project-wide act of disobedience against CC-By-SA.
I would say that GerardM has provided an excellent summary of the attitude
toward Creative Commons that I've encountered on Wikidata: "it's holding us
back", "it's the enemy", "you can't copyright knowledge", "you can't make
us follow it", etc.

The result of this, by the way, is that commercial entities sell modified
versions of Wikidata with impunity. It undermines the terms of other
resources such as DBPedia, which also contains facts extracted from
Wikipedia and respects its Share-Alike terms. Why would anyone use DBPedia
and have to agree to share alike, when they can get similar data from
Wikidata which promises them it's CC-0?

On Wed, 16 May 2018 at 21:43 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hoi,
> Thank you for the overly broad misrepresentation. As always, copyright is
> predatory. As we can prove that copyright is the enemy of science and
> knowledge we should not be upset that *copyright *is abused we should
> welcome it as it proves the point. Also when we use texts from everywhere
> and rephrase it in Wikipedia articles "we" are not lily white either.
>
> In "them old days" generally we felt that when people would use Wikipedia,
> it would only serve our purpose; share the sum of all knowledge. I still
> feel really good about that. And, it has been shown that what we do;
> maintain / curate / update that data that it is not easily given to do as
> well as "we" do it.
>
> When we are to be more precise with our copyright, there are a few things
> we could do to make copyright more transparent. When data is to be uploaded
> (Commons / Wikipedia or Wikidata) we should use a user that is OWNED and
> operated by the copyright holder. The operation may be by proxy and as a
> consequence there is no longer a question about copyright as the copyright
> holder can do as we wants. This makes any future noises just that,
> annoying.
>
> As to copyright on Wikidata, when you consider copyright using data from
> Wikipedia. The question is: "What Wikipedia" I have copied a lot of data
> from several Wikipedias and believe me, from a quality point of view there
> is much to be gained by using Wikidata as an instrument for good because it
> is really strong in identifying friends and false friends. It is superior
> as a tool for disambiguation.
>
> About the copyright on data, the overriding question with data is: do you
> copy data wholesale in Wikidata. That is what a database copyright is
> about. As I wrote on my blog [1], the best data to include is data that is
> corroborated by the fact that it is present in multiple sources. This
> negates the notion of a single source, it also underscores that much of the
> data everywhere is replicated a lot. It also underscores, again, the notion
> that data that is only present in single sources is what needs attention.
> It needs tender loving care, it needs other sources to establish
> credentials. That is in its own right what makes any claim of copyright
> moot. It is in this process that it becomes a "creative" process negating
> the copyright held on databases.
>
> I welcome the attention that is given to copyright in Wikidata. However our
> attention to copyright is predatory in two ways. It is how can we get
> around existing copyright and how can we protect our own. As argued,
> Wikidata shines when it is used for what it is intended to be; the place
> that brings data, of Wikipedias first and elsewhere second, together to be
> used as a repository of quality, open and linked data.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> [1]
>
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2018/05/wikidata-copyright-and-linked-data.html
>
> On 11 May 2018 at 23:10, Rob Speer <rob@luminoso.com> wrote:
>
> > Wow, thanks for the heads up. When I was getting upset about projects
> that
> > change the license on Wikimedia content and commercialize it, I had no
> idea
> > that Wikidata was providing them the cover to do so. The Creative Commons
> > violation is coming from inside the house!
> >
> > On Tue, 8 May 2018 at 03:48 mathieu stumpf guntz <
> > psychoslave@culture-libre.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Hello everybody,
> > >
> > > There is a phabricator ticket on Solve legal uncertainty of Wikidata
> > > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193728> that you might be
> interested
> > > to look at and participate in.
> > >
> > > As Denny suggested in the ticket to give it more visibility through the
> > > discussion on the Wikidata chat
> > > <
> > > https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#
> > Importing_datasets_under_incompatible_licenses>,
> > >
> > > I thought it was interesting to highlight it a bit more.
> > >
> > > Cheers
> > >
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