Charles Matthews wrote:
> <dpbsmith(a)verizon.net> wrote
>
>
>>Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for shaping
>>Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy and a bit dishonest.
>>
>It's a fair point, but I bet it's a stage other encyclopedias go through, to check that their coverage doesn't have obvious gaps.
>
Actually, it's more than a stage, it's a common business practice. It's
sometimes called "editing the competition". Everybody checks out what
their rivals are doing, and so do we.
On the legal side, it's okay to use the competition's material
internally for comparison purposes, but not to copy and redistribute it.
The problem for Wikipedia is that we publish *everything*, which means
that any use of the material on the site itself is potentially copyright
infringement. Some people seem to believe that we can post things for
internal use only, when there is no such thing. If individual users want
to use their personal lists of articles from Columbia or wherever as a
resource, fine, but don't put that resource up on Wikipedia.
--Michael Snow
> From: Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.yu>
> If this becomes a serious issue, I think that it could be solved by
> publishing
> separate topical encyclopedias. For example, "Wikipedia of
> Informatics",
> "Wikipedia of Mathematics" and so on, for every topic that is complete.
Actually, I was thinking about this myself. I think it should be
seriously considered. Browsing Wikipedia it seems clear that
unevenness of coverage extends all the way up to the
most major subject areas. Physical sciences, engineering,
and mathematics have a much higher quality level in general
than life science, medicine, and "the humanities" generally.
Restricting it to a topical encyclopedia has other advantages,
too. Cuts down the amount of work for the first publication,
makes it easier to put one of our many good feet forward,
makes for more interesting "sequels" than "second edition"
or "Wikipedia 2005," etc.
Maybe it's timid of me to point out that this also allows
sidestepping some of the areas most subject to POV disputes
(and minimizing the chances some egregious
troll-authored content might make it into print due to
some momentary lack of vigilance).
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith(a)alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
It has been brought to my attention by a Close Friend that I spend too
much time on Wikipedia. Indeed, even when I try to take a break by
reading my favorite comic strips, my thoughts are often turned back
here.
http://www.unitedmedia.com/creators/onebighappy/archive/images/onebighap
py20012199940218.gif
Maybe it's time I took a vacation. Last time I left, my absence seemed
to have had a positive and beneficial effect.
* I stopped using Developer rights to promote sysops, and Eloquence
stepped up.
Those interested can find the complete text of the bill and information
on its status at:
http://thomas.loc.gov/
While I do agree that this is a bad law, I do not believe it will
interfere with Wikipedia, although IANAL either.
Section 4 of the bill, "Permitted Acts", states:
"(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act
shall not restrict any person from independently generating or
gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it
from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another
person and making that information available in commerce.
(b) ACTS OF MAKING AVAILABLE IN COMMERCE BY NONPROFIT EDUCATIONAL,
SCIENTIFIC, OR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS- The making available in
commerce of a substantial part of a database by a nonprofit
educational, scientific, and research institution, including an
employee or agent of such institution acting within the scope of
such employment or agency, for nonprofit educational, scientific,
and research purposes shall not be prohibited by section 3 if the
court determines that the making available in commerce of the
information in the database is reasonable under the circumstances,
taking into consideration the customary practices associated with
such uses of such database by nonprofit educational, scientific,
or research institutions and other factors that the court
determines relevant.
(c) HYPERLINKING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict the act of
hyperlinking of one online location to another or the providing of
a reference or pointer (including such reference or pointer in a
directory or index) to a database.
(d) NEWS REPORTING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict any person
from making available in commerce information for the primary
purpose of news reporting, including news and sports gathering,
dissemination, and comment, unless the information is time
sensitive and has been gathered by a news reporting entity, and
making available in commerce the information is part of a
consistent pattern engaged in for the purpose of direct competition."
Wikipedia would appear to be protected by the provisions listed above,
as we are a non profit organization, however, we must be careful as
always to cite our sourcs, and not copy sources that aren't expressly
GFDL/Public domain, without adapting and rephrasing them properly.
I think the quoted section of the bill protects us.
James, this should make it more clear what is happening:
Genteen mentioned the discussion about replacing the main page at 17:43 (Eastern) on 21 Feb, and I saw that as my first knowledge of possible change during one of my roughly weekly checks of the Village Pump. By 19:40 a vote on what to do and wehether to do it had been requested. Another person added opposition to a change of the page without a vote or selection process a couple of hours later. At 19:21 [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Main_Page/Test&diff=2478437…] Eloquence wrote that Eloquence thought that it could go live if nobody insisted on having a vote. 9 hours later I added my voice to those asking for a vote and selection process first, writing that I did insist on one. The proposed page went live anyway, without the vote. People seemed to be hurrying, to try to get it changed before the 500,000 article press release, even though that meant skipping our usual consensus-seeking.
At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page/Test at 17:28 under Taking It Live Eloquence proposed taking it live and holding a poll for 24 hours to see what people thought. At 20:23 that day Perl wrote that it had gone live. During the les than three hours between makingtheproposal and itgoing live, this person who'd objected was asleep and found out about it hours later, on waking.
That didn't matter much. That 24 hour vote after going live didn't happen and Eloquence denied that it was there as for a trial period.
Early on the 24th, Raul started a straw poll to ask people to say which of the new versions they thought looked better. The old one wasn't a choice. About two hours later I noticed the straw poll, added the original main page as a choice and indicated that I favored that one. After about 36 hours on the talk page the poll was moved to an archive. At that point, most not involved in creating the new page had said that the original main page was their preferred choice [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Main_Page&oldid=2528529].
So, James, Ed, I most heartily agree that the polling and voting processes which were called for were not well announced or carried out. Nor was there any meaningful attempt at consensus building before going live, since those doing it were focussed on doing it before the press release.
And, of course, so far, most of the negative feedback has not been responded to and there's no sign that I can see of any attemptto build consensus by responding to the objections raised, merely the threat of an edit war if those who object don't continue to show more self-restraint and respect for our community conventions than those who wanted it done as soon as possible.
There should be a vote to see if there is consensus for using the new page. That vote which was proposed three times before the page went live. Since there is unlikely to be consensus, that just might concentrate the minds of those who did it on what they need to do to achieve that consensus.
The two actions most likely to move in the direction of consenus seem to be keeping the community information on the main page and using less space for featured items - those two changes seem to have generated the greatest number of objections to the change.
-----Original Message-----
From: James Rosenzweig
To: wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 14:02:54 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Poll
I'm very confused. There has apparently been a poll
at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page/Archive_14#Straw_poll
for a little while that claims to be deciding whether
or not to keep the current main page. Two MAJOR
problems. One, the poll does not allow someone to
vote for the main page as it is right now (all options
are a week old), and it splits the vote so that there
are four different slightly altered types of new main
page (hence four possible places to cast a vote for
the new design), and one old main page (pooling all
the votes for the old main page in one place) -- this
means that the plurality of the vote right now is for
the old main page. Two, most of us had no idea the
vote was going on until now (and frankly, can't figure
out where to vote "I like what we have this very
moment). Can anyone help me figure out what's going
on?
James Rosenzweig
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you?re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
While Wikipedians must be willing to take on issues in controversial arguments, I'd ask for your inspection and help as activists in a current issue. I'll start work on an article as soon as I finish the e-mail but wanted active participants to be aware of this.
The U.S. Congress has taken up a bill that I think is dangerous to Wikipdia, or any internet info source. The "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act" (HR 3261) is currently pending in the United States House of Representatives. It was introduced to overturn the 'Feist' court decision ruling that facts can't be copyrighted.
Basically, the bill would allow a newspaper to 'own' anything from their obituaries, the NFL, etc. to own sports scores (or maybe ESPN?).
If I understand it, and IANAL, certain people could sue for coptright violations asserting that they 'Owned' facts. IMHO Wikipedia, and lots of free web resources would suffer.
I'll give two web sitations for the court decision:
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm>
and the issue, (yes its an advoicacy site):
<http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/database/>
describiung the proposed law.
With minimal apoliogies for inserting a POV, if you agree with my assesment, write or e-mail your congressman to oppose HR 3261.
_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!
No problem to use any works not in copyright any more,including pre-1923 Columbia and 1911 EB. Also no problem to notice how other encyclopedias commonly do things and create redirects for those alternatives to the way we do them. Their trademark doesn't let them keep those earlier works out of the public domain.
-----Original Message-----
From: "Poor, Edmund W"
To: "Geoff Burling" <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com>, "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 06:18:54 -0800
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Columbia and Copyright
We can bypass Columbia's (possible) "stolen Bible names" claim by
finding a public-domain list of proper names in an old Bible
concordance.
Surely anything printed before 1900 or so has passed into the public
domain, and those old guys often did prodigious works of scholarship
without computers in those days...
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>> >>A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.<<
It MAY be copyrightable. The matter is far from clear.<<
What is far from clear? In US law, it's completely clear that a meaningful selection creates a copyright. If you doubt it, read our article on Feist v. Rural or the decision itself at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=499&invol=340 . It's even more clearly set out in Assessment Technologies v. WIREdata, a 2003 Seventh Circuit decision (citations removed):
"WIREdata???s appeal gets off on the wrong foot, with the contention that Market Drive lacks sufficient originality to be copyrightable. Copyright law unlike patent law does not require substantial originality. ... In fact, it requires only enough originality to enable a work to be distinguished from similar works that are in the public domain, since without some discernible distinction it would be impossible to determine whether a subsequent work was copying a copyrighted work or a public-domain work. This modest requirement is satisfied by Market Drive because no other real estate assessment program arranges the data collected by the assessor in these 456 fields grouped into these 34 categories, and because this structure is not so obvious or inevitable as to lack the minimal originality required"
(Since someone will be tempted to use this at possible copyvios, note that there must be at least minimal creativity, sufficient not to be de minimis (that is, too insubstantial to matter) and that basic English connective words betwen obvious facts in a small amount of text are likely to be de minimis, IMO)
As to whether the pages Timwi created are infringement, they contain a list of about 20,000 articles selected by Columbia, all of theirs, less the ones Timwi could automatically determine weren't in the Wikipedia already. I don't think it's likely that any court would consider a list of 20,000 items the Columbia selected by human work to be anything other than substantial. Hence, it's substantial copying of a copyrighted work.
If you'd like to disagree, please explain why you believe that US law doesn't say that a meaningful selection is copyrightable, citing a case to support your view, or why you believe that a list of 20,000 items from a work is not a substantial selection.
>>We are not planning to publish the list; it is solely for internal use; items which have been considered would be deleted from the list. The titles are only a small part of the entire work.<<
One purpose for which the list was created is to facilitate the creation articles or redirects of the same name in the Wikipedia. Which will mean that the list is published as part of the Wikipedia, one item per incorporated article title.
>> >>We also lose our unwritten fifth fair use factor "are they good people?" positive result in this case.<<
This emotional argument would be totally irrelevant in a law suit.<<
It's not an emotional argument. It's a legal argument. Quoting from Stanford University Libraries' Copyright & Fair Use article at http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.ht… :
"5. The "Fifth" Fair Use Factor: Are You Good or Bad?
When you review fair use cases, you may find that they sometimes seem to contradict one another or conflict with the rules expressed in this chapter. Fair use involves subjective judgments and are often affected by factors such as a judge or jury 's personal sense of right or wrong. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court has indicated that offensiveness is not a fair use factor, you should be aware that a morally offended judge or jury may rationalize its decision against fair use."
Now, you may not like me telling you that there is a fifth factor, but it still does exist and it's one reason why I'm usually writing that our uses are fair: our uses are generally good and for the public good, so judges are likely to choose to interpret the four formal factors in our favor. Not this time.
>>Have they said that they would? Has anyone received a takedown notice? You are speculating about what they might do; that's what copyright paranoia is all about.<<
No, I'm working out how _I_ would advise them to act if I was giving them legal views and wanted to do the greatest possible amount of harm to a competitor taking money from them. Takedown notices are optional and cheap for the Wikipedia to deal with. That makes using them a bad choice. It's more costly, and hence more harmful to us, to go directly tocourt. The most harmful to us time to do that is when there are lots of unsold printed encyclopedias in a warehouse and about as many just distributed to book stores. It's speculation based on how to hurt us the most, knowing that we are competitors and that those competitors have been or will be watching us closely and looking for ways to hurt us, so they can continue to make money.
>> It's also a very big giveaway if they see lots of referrers from a Wikipedia page to their site. <<
They should be happy with that.<<
I agree. It helps them to identify what is happening. Beyond that, it's a sign of how we're going to take money from them in the future and you can be sure that their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders is to prevent us, not say thank you for doing it.
>> I see Jamesday's position as nothing better than extreme copyright paranoia. <<
Thanks for the kind words. The only voice of opposition to me becoming an admin expressed the view that I thought that nothing was copyrighted, in part because I usually write that uses are fair when I write at Possible copyright infringements. I'll be happy to use your words to refute that claim in the future.:) You might consider what it means when I instead write that I believe something is infringement, will result in a legal case and will result in us losing that case.
A note for the Columbia readers, either now or whenever you're doing discovery: I'm not a lawyer and this is not a legal opinion.:)
I'll still administer the mailing list, because it only takes a couple
of minutes each day to delete the spam.
But I'm going to digest mode, so you'll get a lot fewer posts from me.
Which may come as a relief to those who feel I crowd them out...
Sleepy ol' Uncle Ed
We can bypass Columbia's (possible) "stolen Bible names" claim by
finding a public-domain list of proper names in an old Bible
concordance.
Surely anything printed before 1900 or so has passed into the public
domain, and those old guys often did prodigious works of scholarship
without computers in those days...
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed