Hi,
"1c. You're arguing over CHF 200 -- which extraordinarily-cheaply and fundamentally PROTECTS the MWF from copyright infringement suits? Can the SNAK architecture provide that reassurance to the MWF community?"
imho there are some problems with this argumentation:
First i don't really know what standard you are talking about; i can't find any "ISO Topic Map metamodel". The only publication i found was on "Topic Maps — Data Model" which is shortened as TMDM (not TMM). Is that the one you are referring to? There seems to be a whole group of standards based around that specific one, for example "ISO 18048: Topic Maps Query Language (TMQL)" and "ISO 19756: Topic Maps Constraint Language (TMCL)" etc. (wouldn't that mean you would have to pay for them all?)
Then you seem to be mixing the MWF as an entity and the MWF community as a collection of individuals. Even if the MWF somehow purchased the documentation of the standard (or standards from above) from ISO this would mean nothing to people not part of the MWF. The "community" is not an official part of the fundation, i.e. they are not members, so they would have no right to the content of the standard.
The same seems to be true to any third party wanting to use the data from wikidata. They would need to implement the standard (or even group of standards) if they successfully wanted to use the content offered by wikidata. To be able to do this efficiently they probably would need to buy the standards themself. This seems to me to be against wikimedias policy of "...the creation of content not subject to restrictions on creation, use, and reuse.". Having to pay for a documentation to be able to understand the structure the content is held in seems to be a restriction the use of the data.
Furthermore i don't really understand your "copyright infringement thread". Either we are talking about structure, which, to me it seems, is not protected by copyright (didn't oracle just fail in court because of that). Or do we talk about some sort of content that can be protected by copyright? You explicitly said you where not talking about content :"You're citing a policy about CONTENT, I see, though I was focusing on data models and technical interface designs..."
Then again i am no laywer so don't really feel competent enough in that field to give any real advice or have an opinion about what is protected by copyright and what is not.
tldr: To me it seems using the ISO standard would force third parties wanting to consume wikidata content to implement that standard too and thus having to pay for information on how to implement it. This would mean a (financial) restriction on the use of content which is in conflict with wikimedias values.
Friedrich
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:38 AM, Nadja Kutz nadja@daytar.de wrote:
Hello John,
thanks for digging this out.
I see in the Brochure there is not only a postbox but they have even an office where one could meat the ISO: 1, ch. de la Voie-Creuse
It would be interesting to hear whats Wikimedia's opinion on this.
Nadja
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