Hi Mathieu, Rob, Denny, and Wikidatans,
I'm writing to inquire about further Wikidata CC licensing clarifications.
Wikidata may be heading to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ which allows for a) sharing b) adapting and even c) commercially
MIT OCW uses, by way of comparison, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ which allows for a) sharing b) adapting but c) non-commercially
At a Wikimedia conference in early 2017, with Lydia and Dario present, I think I learned that all books / WikiCitations in all 301 of Wikipedia languages could be licensed, or heading to be licensed, with CC-0 licensing - https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ - and per - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193728 - which would allow them to be data sources for online bookstores even. Is this the case. Could some of Wikidata's data be licensed with CC-SA-4 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) and other data be licensed with CC-0?
Thanks.
Cheers, Scott
On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 8:39 AM, 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]
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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