Copyright applies to actual text (or other forms of expression), not to ideas or the content. Since the items do not allow to enter wikitext, there is no compatibility issue due to the license. Filling the language links based on the existing language links in the Wikipedias is not a problem re copyright. Cheers, Denny 2012/11/15 Daniel Kinzler <daniel.kinzler(a)wikimedia.de>de>: -- Project director Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

I agree. Just to clarify what "actual text" should mean: Although a short sentence with several words may occasionally be a copyrightable text (e.g. a poem), it is very rarely so. On Wikipedia infoboxes, due to scope, purpose and style, this can almost be excluded. It is not desirable to exclude brief scope notes or source notes, which occasionally occur in Wikipedia infoboxes, just because they contain several words. I personally would recommend an extraction dryrun and manually check for parameters that have more than perhaps 12-15 words, whether they are creative (= copyrightable) or plain expressions of fact or sources (= not copyrightable). Gregor

On 15 November 2012 23:35, Sven <svenmanguard(a)gmail.com> wrote: (The argument above is independent of licensing, so this should perhaps be discussed in a separate thread?) Gregor

Maybe I've missed something because I'm coming late to this, but it surprises me that people do not seem concerned about keeping track of licenses (not just credit) for the data we'll host. At least in the EU, recently compiled or modified databases are protected by database rights. Maybe the WMF is not affected by such restrictions, and only needs to respect U.S. law. But many Wikidata editors do live in the EU, and so do many potential re-users of the data, in other Wikimedia projects and beyond. I'm concerned that failing to keep track of data licensing will put them at unnecessary legal risk, and will hinder Wikimedia's wider mission of providing free educational material. For instance, once Wikidata content is incorporated into Wikipedia articles, projects like Wikipedia CD Selection ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_CD_Selection) might not be able to freely release their DVD of selected Wikipedia articles in the EU unless it respects the licenses under which the data has been released. (Perhaps this is the case already, but Wikidata will make it much more visible to data owners.) We will find it very difficult to respect these licenses if we don't keep track of them from the beginning. Recording the source of the data is a vital part of this, but it isn't sufficient. For instance, U.K. government data is often released under the Open Government License ( http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/), which requires not just credit but (where possible) a link to the license itself. What to do with data from the EU that's not freely licensed is a thornier issue. Just adding it to Wikidata is arguably illegal and against WMF's terms of use, at least for people living in the EU. I'm aware that many people feel database rights are a bad idea (including me). But they are part of the law in many countries, including Hungary (where phase 2 will be launched), so we shouldn't just ignore them. Going back to the original question, I think the database of interwiki links in Wikipedia is unlikely to creative enough to be copyrightable. The CC-BY-SA-3.0-unported license used on Wikipedia is silent about database rights, so databases that are not copyrighted do not trigger the BY-SA requirements of the license. So I believe Wikidata's current work on interwiki links doesn't violate CC-BY-SA. Avenue

Just to clarify, my concern is about externally made databases, regardless of whether these are imported directly into Wikidata, or have been incorporated into Wikipedia first and imported into Wikidata from there. For example, the population data in Wikipedia's list of ceremonial English counties ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_of_England), which also features in the infoboxes of the articles on each county, would I think be covered by database right under U.K law. Like other ONS material, it has been made available under the OGL, which does impose some obligations on re-users (somewhat similar to CC-BY). I'm not so worried about databases originally generated within Wikipedia, e.g. interwiki links. I think I agree with Gregor's analysis of these, if I understand him correctly. I'm no lawyer either. I'd be very happy to be told I'm wrong, that we have had legal advice and there's no need to worry about licensing external data. Avenue

I guess things would be far more easier if WikiData would choose a CCBYSA-compatible database license like ODbL. I can only repeat myself, that the OpenStreetMap community went through a similar discussion and decided to respect database rights and keep their data as clean as possible. Because they didn't want to take the legal risk, that after 5 years a big company like Google will sue them and so OSM might loose the work of 5 years. I also think that there are two aspects in this topic: 1) the pure legal aspects and 2) how we (Wikipedia users) treat each other and respect the work of others. So the WMF might say: hey you European guys with your DB rights... bad luck that you invest all your work into a US hosted project - we don't care about your rights. Even _if_ this is legally not to be objected, is it fair against the users? To make it clear: I'm into lots of list articles (streets and monuments) which contains lots of data. This content is licenced under CCBYSA today. The day when all this content will be expropriated by WikiData, is the day I'll stop my work for these Wikipedia projects. Regards Alex -- http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Alexrk2

No you cannot: CC-BY-SA is not intended for data, so regarding data you should never use any CC licence (pre-version 4.0, v4 will address database rights) other than CC0. That's why if you want BY-SA conditions, the good choice is ODbL which was created by the Open Knowledge Foundation exactly for this, a share alike licence for opendata. Like I already said a few months back, I totally agree with Alex : using ODbL and therefore keep along the BY-SA choice that rules Wikipedia is the most logical choice. Mocing towards CC0 would be a source of a lot of possible conflicts and possible infringements of Wikipedia's content licence. Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou from Regards Citoyens (France) On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 5:23 PM, Denny Vrandečić <denny.vrandecic(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:

I think the situation is different here, the unported CC-BY-SA doesn't grant any database rights, so it might not be possible to use the data with CC0 or ODBL (it is debatable, that's the point where consulting with a lawyer is useful). http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Data has some information. On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Denny Vrandečić < denny.vrandecic(a)wikimedia.de&gt; wrote:

Denny Vrandečić schrieb am 28.11.2012 17:23: Probably it isn't allowed to import CCBYSA sources into ODbL either. Pretty complicated. Thats why in OpenStreetMap all useres have been asked to agree to the licence change from CCBYSA to ODbL. Alex -- http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Alexrk2

Maybe I'm missing something, but why should we restrict Wikidata to a single standard license (or dual-license)? Why not be like Commons, where content can be uploaded under various free licenses? This would have the advantage of letting us respect the licensing schemes of various data sources. For example, much UK govt data is provided under the OGL, while other organisations release data under a ODBL or a CC-BY license. For user-collated data, we could still encourage or even require a certain license (or dual license). Avenue

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 9:42 PM, Alexrk I was thinking that licenses would apply to a dataset, not to individual items. I don't believe database rights apply to individual items, only to entire datasets (or substantial portions of them), so it would make sense that data licenses would apply at the same level. I'd imagine that we don't want to store databases composed of items that require individual licenses (e.g. images or lengthy texts), at least to begin with. The status of "produced works" would presumably depend on the provisions of the data license. Some might be placed under the same license, or require attribution (e.g. for the ODBL), or not require a license at all. Deciding it's all too hard may be one option. But we should be clearly aware of the long-term consequences of not tracking licenses before we make that decision. I'm not convinced we have thought this through enough yet. Avenue

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Platonides &lt;platonides(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, but in some jurisdictions the licenses are the only things allowing lawful use of the data (at least in sizeable portions). I'm concerned that we'd put some users, and maybe entire projects, at unnecessary legal risk if we ignore this. If the graph in your example was based on 100 numbers from one database, and 100 from another database, then the licenses for both source databases could apply to the derived database. If the licenses weren't compatible, that would indeed be problematic in countries that recognise database rights. To me, this seems yet another reason to keep track of the licenses, so we don't unintentionally lead people into legal trouble. On the other hand, combining data is not always problematic. If each population number in your example was from a separate database, extracting a single number from each database should not infringe on their database rights, and so their various licenses would not apply. (Of course, we'd still want to cite the various sources.) The resulting collection should be a fresh database that could then be hosted under any free license. Avenue

There is some confusion in this thread. A single data item is not licensable. The fact that Berlin is the capital of Germany, or that the population of the Seychelles is 84,000 is not licensable. Let us hope that this will never change. Copyright covers a specific expression, e.g. a concrete text, image, etc. For example, the Britannica article on Germany or the Wikipedia article on the Seychelles might be copyrighted, and thus can be licensed with a license like CC-BY-SA as is the case for the Wikipedia article. This is why it makes sense to allow for different licenses on Commons, at it has many different images and each might have a different license. In a few jurisdictions there are sui generis database rights. These cover complete databases - but they do not cover their individual data items. There are licenses built on top of these database rights, and ODBL is the one that is used by OSM. Unfortunately, CC-BY-SA and ODBL are not compatible. You can not take content licensed under one license and republish it under the other license. Thus follows that using ODBL for Wikidata does not relieve us from *any* of the possible legal issues that are mentioned here due to Wikidata using CC0 as a license. Having different licenses for different data items in Wikidata, as was suggested here, is not possible, as single data items are not licensable. For every data item in Wikidata, there will be the possibility to add a reference that supports that data item. The license of that reference has no effect on the license of the data item. This is the same that happens in Wikipedia: in the article on Japan we might and do have references that have proprietary copyright. We might have a reference that has a CC-BY-ND-NC license. But that does not mean that the article on Japan has to be CC-BY-ND-NC. The license of the reference has no effect on the license of the Wikipedia content. If Wikidata was a collection of databases, like e.g. OKFN's DataHub, then it would make sense to provide for different licenses for each of these databases. But Wikidata does not have any notion of different databases. You cannot take a database and simply upload it to Wikidata. You can do that on DataHub. Wikidata is not DataHub, and does not aim to be DataHub. DataHub is pretty awesome at being DataHub. The goal of Wikidata is different. Choosing CC0 now allows us to later switch to CC-BY-SA4 if we choose so, which actually does take care of database rights, unlike previous versions. Choosing ODBL would not allow us to do so. I hope that clarifies the discussion a bit. It is a murky legal area, which has not been much tested yet in courts, so there are some insecurities there. I hope this helps, Denny 2012/11/30 Finn Aarup Nielsen &lt;fn(a)imm.dtu.dk&gt; -- Project director Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Denny Vrandečić < denny.vrandecic(a)wikimedia.de&gt; wrote: are also confused, at least about what some of our concerns are. These "few jurisdictions" include many (perhaps all?) EU countries. I gather Wikidata's phase 2 is starting with the Hungarian Wikipedia. Databases are protected by database rights under Hungarian law, so we need to be clear about their implications for Wikidata by the time phase 2 begins. I think we are talking about different legal issues. My main concern is about external databases, with rights held by other organisations, that we wish to host on Wikidata (in whole or in substantial part). See my earlier post ( http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-l/2012-November/001239.html) for an example, based on the data in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_of_England and the infoboxes for various county articles listed within. This data is licensed by the UK government under the Open Government License (OGL, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/) I believe UK editors would be breaking their country's law if they uploaded a significant portion of this database to Wikidata without following the terms of the OGL. These include giving credit and linking to the license where possible. They could probably do this in an adhoc fashion through the reference field, but it would be much better to have proper support for license tracking built in. My suggestion was that we keep track of licenses for different databases held in Wikidata, not for each individual item. I agree that item licensing is an inappropriate concept. Storing licensing info for databases at item level would seem possible as a fallback, however, if Wikidata has no direct support for databases. Wikidata can certainly be thought of as a collection of databases (or parts of databases), regardless of whether Wikidata itself distinguishes between them. I've only played around a little with Wikidata, and I'll take your word for it that simple uploads of databases are impossible. But based on what Wikidata promises to do, it must still be possible to upload them somehow. Choosing CC0, and only CC0, is fine IMO for the interwiki links dealt with in phase 1. But I believe it is not adequate for phases 2 and 3. These phases will deal with data that in many cases has been sourced from external databases. In some jurisdictions, these are legally protected and any licensing conditions will have legal force on editors living there. Yes, there is some legal uncertainty, particularly over which law applies when data crosses borders. But I do not see this as a good reason to ignore the legalities either. On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Denny Vrandečić < Yes, we have a license, and I agree this should present no legal problems for newly created databases. My concern is about what it means for preexisting, externally created databases. Claiming that a OGL'd database (say) becomes CC0 when imported into Wikidata seems risky to me. But IANAL, so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Avenue

My understanding is this: The elements of a database that are copyrightable are the selection and the arrangement. There is no way that we're going to come close to the arrangement of any other database, so I'm not going to discuss that. As for the selection (what items the database creators have decided to include), we really don't have to worry about that. Wikidata is going to be taking what it needs from various places. I can't think of a single database, even the US Census database, where we're going be taking anywhere near as much as we're not going to be taking. Simply put, all of these databases are going to be holding a lot of information that isn't useful to our purposes. If we did decide to import a database in whole, then we might run into arramgenent problems, however Wikidata has neither the technical mechanisms nor the actual need to import databases whole. We're going to be taking individual data points, from dozens to hundreds of different places, and mixing them together. I think that part of the issue here is that Avenue really isn't aware of what Wikidata's objectives are. With the objectives that Wikidata has, I don't see how this could be an issue. Sven On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 12:41 PM, Denny Vrandečić < denny.vrandecic(a)wikimedia.de&gt; wrote:

Marco wrote: Yes, a database may be copyrightable, if the creativity in selecting and arranging information is copyrightable. This possibility exists in many countries and is completely different from database rights. To which extent case law provides a copyright protection and which level of creativity is required varies in each state. In the EU, the database rights directive addresses also database copyrights and tries to harmonize it among EU member states. However, the database right is a completely separate right. It exists only in the EU, and it has nothing to do with the argument above. Gregor

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Avenue &lt;avenue42(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It would be useful when people make statements such as this to declare: a) what jurisdictions they hold qualifications in b) what jurisdictions they are making their statements about Tom