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.
we hired
lawyers to write a legal review about the extraction situation. Facts
can be extracted and republished under CC-0 without problem as is the
case of infoboxes.. Copying a whole database is a different because
database rights hold. If you only extract ~ two sentences it falls under
citation, which is also easy. If it is more than two sentence, then
copyright applies.
I can check whether it is ready and shareable. The legal review
(Gutachten) is quite a big thing as it has some legal relevancy and can
be cited in court.
Hence we can switch to ODC-BY with facts as CC-0 and the text as
share-alike. However the attribution mentioned in the imprint is still
fine, since it is under database and not the content/facts.
I am still uncertain about the attribution. If you remix and publish you
need to cite the direct sources. But if somebody takes from you, does he
only attribute to you or to everybody you used in a transitive way.
Anyhow, we are sharpening the whole model towards technology, not
data/content. So the databus will be a transparent layer and it is much
easier to find the source like Wikipedia and Wikidata and do
contributions there, which is actually one of the intentions of
share-alike (getting work pushed back/upstream).
All the best,
Sebastian
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_Wik…
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(a)luminoso.com
<mailto: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(a)gmail.com <mailto: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-d…
On 11 May 2018 at 23:10, Rob Speer <rob(a)luminoso.com
<mailto: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(a)culture-libre.org
<mailto: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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All the best,
Sebastian Hellmann
Director of Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT)
Competence Center
at the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) at Leipzig University
Executive Director of the DBpedia Association
Projects: