On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I wasn't thinking of fair use. I was thinking "work of joint authorship".
Does it being a work of joint authorship help? The GFDL explicitly states how modifications work, I think, so I don't think we'll be able to use joint authorship to get around it. It would boil down to nullifying the license, which is not something we should be trying to do.
Joint authors, in the absense of a joint authorship agreement, can grant any non-exclusive license to anyone.
You've split threads so I can't see the history of discussion here.
On 8/23/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Joint authors, in the absense of a joint authorship agreement, can grant any non-exclusive license to anyone.
Our articles aren't joint authorship in that sense. Each editor is an independent licensee of the previous copyright holding editors who, under the permissions of the license, creates and publishes a derivative under the same license.
On 8/23/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
You've split threads so I can't see the history of discussion here.
On 8/23/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Joint authors, in the absense of a joint authorship agreement, can grant any non-exclusive license to anyone.
Our articles aren't joint authorship in that sense.
Whether or not they are is a question which can only truly be answered by a court.
Each editor is an independent licensee of the previous copyright holding editors who, under the permissions of the license, creates and publishes a derivative under the same license.
If that is true then each editor is committing copyright infringement, because Wikipedia articles don't comply with the GFDL. I find it hard to believe that this is the case.
On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
If that is true then each editor is committing copyright infringement, because Wikipedia articles don't comply with the GFDL. I find it hard to believe that this is the case.
I don't understand... what part of the GFDL is violated?
Section 4.
On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I don't understand... what part of the GFDL is violated?
Section 4.
If memory serves, section 4 is quite large. Could you save me reading through the whole thing and just tell me in English what we're doing wrong?
Not really. The GFDL tells you what you *can* do, not what you *can't* do. If you want to apply the GFDL to a work, first you have to define "the Document". You can't really do this without actually reading the license.
Frankly it's difficult to make the GFDL work for much of any of what Wikipedia is doing. It doesn't fit in straightforwardly with section 4 part A, B, C, D, E, F, I, or J. And the other parts aren't really in compliance so much as they just don't apply. You could probably make some convoluted definitions of "the Document" to kind of sort of be in compliance with some of the license, but if I defined "the Document" for you and then explained how that definition didn't work I'd just be creating a strawman argument.
Not really. The GFDL tells you what you *can* do, not what you *can't* do. If you want to apply the GFDL to a work, first you have to define "the Document". You can't really do this without actually reading the license.
Frankly it's difficult to make the GFDL work for much of any of what Wikipedia is doing. It doesn't fit in straightforwardly with section 4 part A, B, C, D, E, F, I, or J. And the other parts aren't really in compliance so much as they just don't apply. You could probably make some convoluted definitions of "the Document" to kind of sort of be in compliance with some of the license, but if I defined "the Document" for you and then explained how that definition didn't work I'd just be creating a strawman argument.
I think "the Document" is usually taken as meaning an individual page. How does that definition fail?
On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Not really. The GFDL tells you what you *can* do, not what you *can't* do. If you want to apply the GFDL to a work, first you have to define "the Document". You can't really do this without actually reading the license.
Frankly it's difficult to make the GFDL work for much of any of what Wikipedia is doing. It doesn't fit in straightforwardly with section 4 part A, B, C, D, E, F, I, or J. And the other parts aren't really in compliance so much as they just don't apply. You could probably make some convoluted definitions of "the Document" to kind of sort of be in compliance with some of the license, but if I defined "the Document" for you and then explained how that definition didn't work I'd just be creating a strawman argument.
I think "the Document" is usually taken as meaning an individual page. How does that definition fail?
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct. B. No authors are listed on the title page. C. No publisher is listed on the title page. D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license. I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.
On 8/23/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct. B. No authors are listed on the title page. C. No publisher is listed on the title page. D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license. I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.
Quite simply, you're either totally bind or batshit insane. If it's the former your screen reader needs a serious upgrade, if it's the latter I can't help you.
Quit your trolling Anthony.
Gregory Maxwell schreef:
On 8/23/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct. B. No authors are listed on the title page. C. No publisher is listed on the title page. D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license. I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.
Quite simply, you're either totally bind or batshit insane. If it's the former your screen reader needs a serious upgrade, if it's the latter I can't help you.
He's also completely right.
If you define a "Document" to mean a single page of Wikipedia, there is no way to satisfy the requirements of the GFDL to the letter. Anthony also claims that there is no way to define "Document" so that we're in complience; I don't know if that is true, but it seems likely.
The reality is that Wikipedia relies on its contributors not to take the GFDL completely litterally. And then, we go mad when someone else republishes our content without following the GFDL.
Eugene
On 8/24/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
He's also completely right.
No, not in the slightest. He's proposed a hierarchy of ridiculous and strained interpretations which exceed the boundaries of rational thought, and which deserved no response. I'm sorry you were suckered by it.
If you define a "Document" to mean a single page of Wikipedia,
The document is an article. It spans multiple http fetched pages. There is nothing surprising about this.
There certainly are some things which are not clear because they are so far outside of the scope of the language of the license, but thats not the case for anything mentioned here.
Gregory Maxwell schreef:
On 8/24/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
If you define a "Document" to mean a single page of Wikipedia,
The document is an article. It spans multiple http fetched pages. There is nothing surprising about this.
There is, actually, as neither Athony, nor me, nor apparently Thomas Dalton ("I think "the Document" is usually taken as meaning an individual page.") knew this.
For something that is not surprising, [[Wikipedia:Verbatim copying]] is awfully vague about it. This is about copying an entire "Document" from wikipedia, but even this page (which is linked to at [[Wikipedia:Copyrights#Reusers' rights and obligations]]) does not make clear what a Wikipedia Document is. Does it include the history? Is it the entire HTML source of several pages, or only the wikitext (which does not comply with the GFDL at all)?
Eugene
On 8/24/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
Gregory Maxwell schreef:
On 8/24/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
If you define a "Document" to mean a single page of Wikipedia,
The document is an article. It spans multiple http fetched pages. There is nothing surprising about this.
There is, actually, as neither Athony, nor me, nor apparently Thomas Dalton ("I think "the Document" is usually taken as meaning an individual page.") knew this.
It's also not an answer. From this definition I know that "the Document" is synonymous with "an article" and that it "spans mutiple http fetched pages", but I don't know what those http fetched pages are.
Take an article like [[Gmail]] or [[List of Google products]]. What is "the Document" for those articles? Where is the Transparent copy? If I want to create a derivative work based on one of those articles, and I don't want to do so by clicking on "edit this page", what do I do?
The only way the answer to this is not surprising is if you've been drinking the kool-aid for way way too long and you forget that there's a world out there who hasn't heard about any of this stuff. Most judges, for instance, are going to hear that "the Document" is "an article" and they're going to think you mean essentially this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Google_products&printa...
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct.
Maybe. You could consider the URL to be the title, in which case they are distinct.
B. No authors are listed on the title page.
The authors are listed one page away from the document itself - you could even consider the History page to be the title page, I guess.
C. No publisher is listed on the title page.
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license.
Have you looked at the bottom of the page? Where it says "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." with the words "GNU Free Documentation License" linking to a local copy of the license?
I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.
What? Every page has a history... what are you talking about?
On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
The publisher is the editor of the page. Wikimedia is not a publisher, it's just a service provider.. a webhost. If you can find a place where it's stated that Wikipedia/Wikimedia is a publisher we'll fix it right away.
On 24/08/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
The publisher is the editor of the page. Wikimedia is not a publisher, it's just a service provider.. a webhost. If you can find a place where it's stated that Wikipedia/Wikimedia is a publisher we'll fix it right away.
I'm not a lwayer but doesn't the sentence before you agree to the GFDL say that other editors will rip your contributions apart mercilessly? (or words to that effect - "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it.") I am quite sure that that is a shorthand definition of GFDL!
mike
On 8/24/07, michael west michawest@gmail.com
I'm not a lwayer but doesn't the sentence before you agree to the GFDL say that other editors will rip your contributions apart mercilessly? (or words to that effect - "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it.") I am quite sure that that is a shorthand definition of GFDL!
That's not intended to be explaining the GFDL! It's a statement of general editorial philosophy which just so happens to be one allowed by the license, or rather, that the license was chosen to allow. :-)
-Kat
On 24/08/07, Kat Walsh kat@mindspillage.org wrote:
On 8/24/07, michael west michawest@gmail.com
I'm not a lwayer but doesn't the sentence before you agree to the GFDL
say
that other editors will rip your contributions apart mercilessly? (or
words
to that effect - "If you don't want your writing to be edited
mercilessly or
redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it.") I am quite sure
that
that is a shorthand definition of GFDL!
That's not intended to be explaining the GFDL! It's a statement of general editorial philosophy which just so happens to be one allowed by the license, or rather, that the license was chosen to allow. :-)
-Kat
ok, thats not our (WP) free for all? So editorial philosophy can actually overide any editors desire to submit under a license which gives him more rights than what we will do (speedy delete, PROD)?
On 8/24/07, michael west michawest@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/08/07, Kat Walsh kat@mindspillage.org wrote:
On 8/24/07, michael west michawest@gmail.com
I'm not a lwayer but doesn't the sentence before you agree to the GFDL
say
that other editors will rip your contributions apart mercilessly? (or
words
to that effect - "If you don't want your writing to be edited
mercilessly or
redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it.") I am quite sure
that
that is a shorthand definition of GFDL!
That's not intended to be explaining the GFDL! It's a statement of general editorial philosophy which just so happens to be one allowed by the license, or rather, that the license was chosen to allow. :-)
-Kat
ok, thats not our (WP) free for all? So editorial philosophy can actually overide any editors desire to submit under a license which gives him more rights than what we will do (speedy delete, PROD)?
I'm not sure how you got any of that out of what I said. (And I'm not certain that I understand what you mean.)
-Kat
On 24/08/07, Kat Walsh kat@mindspillage.org wrote:
On 8/24/07, michael west michawest@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/08/07, Kat Walsh kat@mindspillage.org wrote:
On 8/24/07, michael west michawest@gmail.com
I'm not a lwayer but doesn't the sentence before you agree to the
GFDL
say
that other editors will rip your contributions apart mercilessly?
(or
words
to that effect - "If you don't want your writing to be edited
mercilessly or
redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it.") I am quite
sure
that
that is a shorthand definition of GFDL!
That's not intended to be explaining the GFDL! It's a statement of general editorial philosophy which just so happens to be one allowed by the license, or rather, that the license was chosen to allow. :-)
-Kat
ok, thats not our (WP) free for all? So editorial philosophy can
actually
overide any editors desire to submit under a license which gives him
more
rights than what we will do (speedy delete, PROD)?
I'm not sure how you got any of that out of what I said. (And I'm not certain that I understand what you mean.)
-Kat
What I meant was before any editor is directed to the actual GFDL license, they are treated with our "editorial philosophy" - write it and weep! It isn't GFDL in a nutshell and earlier David said that GFDL can never be in a nutshell. Either ditch the write it and weep (you may be edited MERCILICILLY) or pop up the whole GFDL before every post and agree, like you ndo with every piece of software. or ditch it and license everything to the foundation, with a clause saying that "it" will not be indemnified etc...........
On 8/24/07, michael west michawest@gmail.com wrote:
What I meant was before any editor is directed to the actual GFDL license, they are treated with our "editorial philosophy" - write it and weep! It isn't GFDL in a nutshell and earlier David said that GFDL can never be in a nutshell. Either ditch the write it and weep (you may be edited MERCILICILLY) or pop up the whole GFDL before every post and agree, like you ndo with every piece of software. or ditch it and license everything to the foundation, with a clause saying that "it" will not be indemnified etc...........
Huh? Why would we want to harass our editors by popping up the licence before each edit is made?
Johnleemk
On 8/23/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
The publisher is the editor of the page. Wikimedia is not a publisher, it's just a service provider.. a webhost. If you can find a place where it's stated that Wikipedia/Wikimedia is a publisher we'll fix it right away.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_Publish... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/March_2005
Thomas Dalton schreef:
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct.
Maybe. You could consider the URL to be the title, in which case they are distinct.
Actually, the GFDL says the title of the modified version should be distinct from the titles of all previous versions. If the URL is the title, this is clearly not the case.
B. No authors are listed on the title page.
The authors are listed one page away from the document itself - you could even consider the History page to be the title page, I guess.
I'm sure Anthony meant "Title Page" (the term used in section 4B) instead of "title page" here.
For the purposes of the GFDL, "Title Page" has a very specific definition: "For works in formats which do not have any title page as such, "Title Page" means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text." (section 1.)
As we do not have a title page for every document, "Title Page" means the text at the top of the page, maybe including the sidebar and the tags on the top. It does not contain the authors. It does contain a link to the history, but that is not enough. (For "real documents", mentioning the original authors in the Changelog of a document is not enough to satisfy the requirements.)
C. No publisher is listed on the title page.
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
But not in the "Title Page". If Wikipedia is the publisher... If the wikipedians themselves are the publishers of the pages, they are not mentioned anywhere on the page itself.
D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license.
Have you looked at the bottom of the page? Where it says "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." with the words "GNU Free Documentation License" linking to a local copy of the license?
Our [[Copyright notice article]] conveniently links to http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.html, which describes exactly what a copyright notice looks like: "Copyright 200x John Doe1, John Doe 2". Nothing more, nothing less, except that you can use a C in a circle instead of the word copyright, and perhaps you may get away with replacing the names by "Wikipedia contributors". No such text appears on our articles.
And a link to the license is not enough to satisfy the GFDL. The Document should "include an unaltered copy of this license", and as you have defined "Document" to mean the single article, it does not satisfy this requirement.
I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.
What? Every page has a history... what are you talking about?
Read the definition of "section Entitled History". It is a subunit of the document, not a link.
Eugene
On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct.
Maybe. You could consider the URL to be the title, in which case they are distinct.
No, if you consider the URL to be the title, then every modified version of the page has the same title.
B. No authors are listed on the title page.
The authors are listed one page away from the document itself - you could even consider the History page to be the title page, I guess.
The Title page is part of the Document, not one page away from the Document, and your definition of "the Document" didn't include what you call "the History page". If you want to include as part of the Document all the history items linked from the page (this is where you get into convoluted definitions of "the Document" which in the end don't work anyway), then where is the Transparent copy of the Document?
C. No publisher is listed on the title page.
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
Surely not. Wikipedia is not an entity. The Wikimedia Foundation is an entity, but they specifically state that they are not publishers.
D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license.
Have you looked at the bottom of the page? Where it says "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." with the words "GNU Free Documentation License" linking to a local copy of the license?
Yes. That's not a copyright notice, nor is it a license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. Such a creature would look like this:
" Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME." [the copyright notice] " Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License"." [the license notice]
There is a link to a copy of the license. But the GFDL says that the license is supposed to be part of the document itself. Make another strange convolution to the definition of "the Document" and you can avoid this one, though.
I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.
What? Every page has a history... what are you talking about?
The section entitled History is part of the Document. You said the Document was a single page, which I agree would be the most straightforward definition. So a section entitled History, by a straightforward interpretation, would be something that in wikitext starts with "==History==".
Now, if you want to incorporate the thing you get when you click on "history" and then keep clicking next over and over again as part of "the Document"...
Where is the Transparent copy of the Document? Where are the previous titles (to even get "in the spirit" compliance you at least need the page move history)? Where is the list of previous publishers? When Documents are merged, why isn't the history merged, as required by seciton 5? Why is the history tab considered part of the document but not the talk or edit tab?
If you can answer these questions (no doubt by introducing more non-intuitive definitions), then you've successfully responded to a single issue of compliance. I don't think they all can be answered though. One in particular which I can't think of an answer to is "where is the Transparent copy of the Document". This is a copy "that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly", which in my humble opinion excludes making people jump through hoops clicking on link after link reconstructing the Document.
As I figured I got called a troll for pointing this out, which is why I hesitated before getting into it in the first place. But it is not trolling to point out the absolutely obvious fact that Wikipedia does not fit in any straightforward way into the GFDL.
I think some people might be reading something completely unintended into this. I'm *not* accusing anyone of violating copyright law. In fact, I believe there are permissions other than the GFDL which editors have when creating Wikipedia. It'd be "batshit insane" to suggest that everyone who ever edited Wikipedia were infringing copyright. But it'd likewise be "batshit insane" to suggest that Wikipedians can do all the things they do merely because they have permission under the GFDL to do them.
(Please excuse the extensive quoting, I decided it really was necessary to include the 3 preceding emails for my email to make sense.)
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct.
Maybe. You could consider the URL to be the title, in which case they are distinct.
No, if you consider the URL to be the title, then every modified version of the page has the same title.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?revisionid=1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?revisionid=2
(or whatever they are) are distinct names. The url without a revisionid is just a shortcut to the latest revision.
B. No authors are listed on the title page.
The authors are listed one page away from the document itself - you could even consider the History page to be the title page, I guess.
The Title page is part of the Document, not one page away from the Document, and your definition of "the Document" didn't include what you call "the History page". If you want to include as part of the Document all the history items linked from the page (this is where you get into convoluted definitions of "the Document" which in the end don't work anyway), then where is the Transparent copy of the Document?
If we go by the spirit of the license, the transparent copy is the source shown on the edit page. While the exact wording may require the history to be editable, you aren't allow to edit it (beyond adding your name, which is done automatically), so that's a pretty pointless bit of pedantry. A possible alternative is to consider the database dumps to be the transparent copy, they aren't as easy to edit, though.
C. No publisher is listed on the title page.
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
Surely not. Wikipedia is not an entity. The Wikimedia Foundation is an entity, but they specifically state that they are not publishers.
Ok, I don't know about the legal definitions, but by the everyday meaning of the word, the WMF is the publisher. They are the one that makes the content available to the public, that's what the word means.
D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license.
Have you looked at the bottom of the page? Where it says "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." with the words "GNU Free Documentation License" linking to a local copy of the license?
Yes. That's not a copyright notice, nor is it a license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. Such a creature would look like this:
" Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME." [the copyright notice] " Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License"." [the license notice]
There is a link to a copy of the license. But the GFDL says that the license is supposed to be part of the document itself. Make another strange convolution to the definition of "the Document" and you can avoid this one, though.
You have to "include" a copy of the license. It's not clear if that is "include as part of the document" or "include with the document when distributing". If we interpret it as the latter, we're fine.
I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.
What? Every page has a history... what are you talking about?
The section entitled History is part of the Document. You said the Document was a single page, which I agree would be the most straightforward definition. So a section entitled History, by a straightforward interpretation, would be something that in wikitext starts with "==History==".
Now, if you want to incorporate the thing you get when you click on "history" and then keep clicking next over and over again as part of "the Document"...
Where is the Transparent copy of the Document? Where are the previous titles (to even get "in the spirit" compliance you at least need the page move history)? Where is the list of previous publishers? When Documents are merged, why isn't the history merged, as required by seciton 5? Why is the history tab considered part of the document but not the talk or edit tab?
I don't see any problem with defining "document" to mean the page together with the history. And I've given the case for transparent copies above.
On 8/24/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
(Please excuse the extensive quoting, I decided it really was necessary to include the 3 preceding emails for my email to make sense.)
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct.
Maybe. You could consider the URL to be the title, in which case they are distinct.
No, if you consider the URL to be the title, then every modified version of the page has the same title.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?revisionid=1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?revisionid=2
(or whatever they are) are distinct names. The url without a revisionid is just a shortcut to the latest revision.
Yes, but when revisionid=1 was published it was published as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
I also think it's incredibly odd to call a url the title of an article.
B. No authors are listed on the title page.
The authors are listed one page away from the document itself - you could even consider the History page to be the title page, I guess.
The Title page is part of the Document, not one page away from the Document, and your definition of "the Document" didn't include what you call "the History page". If you want to include as part of the Document all the history items linked from the page (this is where you get into convoluted definitions of "the Document" which in the end don't work anyway), then where is the Transparent copy of the Document?
If we go by the spirit of the license, the transparent copy is the source shown on the edit page.
That doesn't contain any of the stuff you're calling part of the document. It doesn't contain the history information, it doesn't contain the GFDL, it doesn't contain the license notice, or a copyright notice - it doesn't even contain the title page.
While the exact wording may require the history to be editable, you aren't allow to edit it (beyond adding your name, which is done automatically), so that's a pretty pointless bit of pedantry.
It's not pedantry at all. If I want to create a fork of a Wikipedia article, I need a Transparent copy of the entire document. I don't want to go hunting through page after page of history and what links here and all the other stuff I need in order to comply with the license. I want to download a copy of the entire document in a straightforward way, make my edits, add my name to the title page, add a line to the history section, and be done with it. I can't do that with Wikipedia articles, and that's a major material breach of both the word and the spirit of the GFDL.
A possible alternative is to consider the database dumps to be the transparent copy, they aren't as easy to edit, though.
They would also require you to treat the entire database as a single Document. This approach brings us closer to compliance on many parts of the GFDL, but has problems with others. We can go over that approach if you'd like, but you've gotta pick one definition of the Document and stick with it - you can't go back and forth.
C. No publisher is listed on the title page.
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
Surely not. Wikipedia is not an entity. The Wikimedia Foundation is an entity, but they specifically state that they are not publishers.
Ok, I don't know about the legal definitions, but by the everyday meaning of the word, the WMF is the publisher. They are the one that makes the content available to the public, that's what the word means.
I think it's unclear whether or not the WMF is the publisher. But the WMF isn't listed on the title page anyway.
D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license.
Have you looked at the bottom of the page? Where it says "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." with the words "GNU Free Documentation License" linking to a local copy of the license?
Yes. That's not a copyright notice, nor is it a license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. Such a creature would look like this:
" Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME." [the copyright notice] " Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License"." [the license notice]
There is a link to a copy of the license. But the GFDL says that the license is supposed to be part of the document itself. Make another strange convolution to the definition of "the Document" and you can avoid this one, though.
You have to "include" a copy of the license. It's not clear if that is "include as part of the document" or "include with the document when distributing". If we interpret it as the latter, we're fine.
I think it's clear from reading the entire license that "include" in this case means "include within the Document". But really this is a minor breach compared to the other ones.
I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.
What? Every page has a history... what are you talking about?
The section entitled History is part of the Document. You said the Document was a single page, which I agree would be the most straightforward definition. So a section entitled History, by a straightforward interpretation, would be something that in wikitext starts with "==History==".
Now, if you want to incorporate the thing you get when you click on "history" and then keep clicking next over and over again as part of "the Document"...
Where is the Transparent copy of the Document? Where are the previous titles (to even get "in the spirit" compliance you at least need the page move history)? Where is the list of previous publishers? When Documents are merged, why isn't the history merged, as required by seciton 5? Why is the history tab considered part of the document but not the talk or edit tab?
I don't see any problem with defining "document" to mean the page together with the history. And I've given the case for transparent copies above.
The Transparent copy is supposed to include the section entitled History. And you didn't answer what about when pages are merged. Why isn't the history merged? Should it be? Are people who merge pages without merging the history in breach of copyright law?
That doesn't contain any of the stuff you're calling part of the document. It doesn't contain the history information, it doesn't contain the GFDL, it doesn't contain the license notice, or a copyright notice - it doesn't even contain the title page.
The spirit of the license is that a transparent copy is one that is easily editable. The parts you're saying aren't included are parts which have to be preserved, so there is no need for them to be editable.
While the exact wording may require the history to be editable, you aren't allow to edit it (beyond adding your name, which is done automatically), so that's a pretty pointless bit of pedantry.
It's not pedantry at all. If I want to create a fork of a Wikipedia article, I need a Transparent copy of the entire document. I don't want to go hunting through page after page of history and what links here and all the other stuff I need in order to comply with the license. I want to download a copy of the entire document in a straightforward way, make my edits, add my name to the title page, add a line to the history section, and be done with it. I can't do that with Wikipedia articles, and that's a major material breach of both the word and the spirit of the GFDL.
A possible alternative is to consider the database dumps to be the transparent copy, they aren't as easy to edit, though.
They would also require you to treat the entire database as a single Document. This approach brings us closer to compliance on many parts of the GFDL, but has problems with others. We can go over that approach if you'd like, but you've gotta pick one definition of the Document and stick with it - you can't go back and forth.
No, you could consider the database to be a collection of lots of documents. I don't think the license says the transparent copy has to be available on its own.
I think it's unclear whether or not the WMF is the publisher. But the WMF isn't listed on the title page anyway.
Well, the "title page" says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". I would say the WMF is the publisher and is working under the name "Wikipedia". The license doesn't define the word "publisher" anywhere, so I think the everyday meaning of the word is what is meant.
On 8/24/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
That doesn't contain any of the stuff you're calling part of the document. It doesn't contain the history information, it doesn't contain the GFDL, it doesn't contain the license notice, or a copyright notice - it doesn't even contain the title page.
The spirit of the license is that a transparent copy is one that is easily editable. The parts you're saying aren't included are parts which have to be preserved, so there is no need for them to be editable.
My problem is not with editing them, my problem is with accessing them. I can't preserve them if I can't find them.
The spirit of the license is that I should be able to fork a Wikipedia article. In fact, the right to fork is, in my opinion, the most important right granted by the GFDL. If I can't access a Transparent version of the Document, I can't fork it. I can edit it within Wikipedia, perhaps, if I haven't been banned, but the GFDL isn't supposed to restrict you to editing the Document on a single website.
While the exact wording may require the history to be editable, you aren't allow to edit it (beyond adding your name, which is done automatically), so that's a pretty pointless bit of pedantry.
It's not pedantry at all. If I want to create a fork of a Wikipedia article, I need a Transparent copy of the entire document. I don't want to go hunting through page after page of history and what links here and all the other stuff I need in order to comply with the license. I want to download a copy of the entire document in a straightforward way, make my edits, add my name to the title page, add a line to the history section, and be done with it. I can't do that with Wikipedia articles, and that's a major material breach of both the word and the spirit of the GFDL.
A possible alternative is to consider the database dumps to be the transparent copy, they aren't as easy to edit, though.
They would also require you to treat the entire database as a single Document. This approach brings us closer to compliance on many parts of the GFDL, but has problems with others. We can go over that approach if you'd like, but you've gotta pick one definition of the Document and stick with it - you can't go back and forth.
No, you could consider the database to be a collection of lots of documents. I don't think the license says the transparent copy has to be available on its own.
That's another definition too, and yes, you could define things that way. But you'd run into all sorts of problems doing that. The database dump doesn't even have a section entitled History, for one.
"A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly"
The database dumps are absolutely not suitable for revising the document straightforwardly.
I think it's unclear whether or not the WMF is the publisher. But the WMF isn't listed on the title page anyway.
Well, the "title page" says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". I would say the WMF is the publisher and is working under the name "Wikipedia". The license doesn't define the word "publisher" anywhere, so I think the everyday meaning of the word is what is meant.
I, on the other hand, think it's clear that this tagline is not meant to be an acknowledgement of the publisher. Besides the fact that the WMF claims it isn't the publisher and that they aren't registered as doing business under the name "Wikipedia", the fact that the other projects use a different tagline (or no tagline) also lends to the common sense conclusion that this is a tagline, and not an acknowledgement of the publisher.
Thomas Dalton wrote:
(Please excuse the extensive quoting, I decided it really was necessary to include the 3 preceding emails for my email to make sense.)
No problem. Your past quotation practices have been tended to foreshoten the background to what you say a little too much.
C. No publisher is listed on the title page.
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places
Surely not. Wikipedia is not an entity. The Wikimedia Foundation is an entity, but they specifically state that they are not publishers.
Ok, I don't know about the legal definitions, but by the everyday meaning of the word, the WMF is the publisher. They are the one that makes the content available to the public, that's what the word means.
Perhaps then it would be good to read what distinction you make between a publisher and an ISP. I think that it is a distinction that would be crucial in any legal dispute.
Ec
On 8/25/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Ok, I don't know about the legal definitions, but by the everyday meaning of the word, the WMF is the publisher. They are the one that makes the content available to the public, that's what the word means.
Perhaps then it would be good to read what distinction you make between a publisher and an ISP. I think that it is a distinction that would be crucial in any legal dispute.
Precisely, Ray. The question is, does a webhost like Geocities "publish" content, or just make it available through their infrastructure, while the user who authors the content is considered the publisher? The WMF position is that it is a webhost, and editors are publishers.
By the way, why are we talking about lay, as opposed to legal definitions? Are we discussing human readability? AFAICT, the earlier discussion was centring on the GFDL, a legal document. The term "publisher" has a special meaning in law.
Johnleemk
Precisely, Ray. The question is, does a webhost like Geocities "publish" content, or just make it available through their infrastructure, while the user who authors the content is considered the publisher? The WMF position is that it is a webhost, and editors are publishers.
There is a difference between a webhost like Geocities and the WMF. Geocities just hosts webpages. The WMF hosts a complicated website. WMF is responsible for everything about Wikipedia that isn't actual content. The software, the skins, the interface (give or take the bits that can be changed in the Mediawiki: namespace). The author doesn't do anything more than submitting a manuscript (ie. the wikitext). WMF then takes that manuscript, parses it and integrates it with everything else (prints and binds the book, puts a fancy cover design on it, adds all the stuff that goes on the title page, etc) and makes it available to the public. I call that publishing.
By the way, why are we talking about lay, as opposed to legal definitions? Are we discussing human readability? AFAICT, the earlier discussion was centring on the GFDL, a legal document. The term "publisher" has a special meaning in law.
Because we're lay people, not lawyers. I certainly don't know enough about the law to know the precise legal definition of "publisher", and I doubt many people on this list do.
Perhaps then it would be good to read what distinction you make between a publisher and an ISP. I think that it is a distinction that would be crucial in any legal dispute.
A publisher provides content to the public. An ISP provides an internet connection to public. The difference is similar to that between a publisher and a book shop. A book shop has nothing to do with the content, it's just a middle man. A publisher takes the content from the authors and prepares it to be read by the public (eg. parses the wikitext).
Anthony wrote:
On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
C. No publisher is listed on the title page.
The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
Surely not. Wikipedia is not an entity. The Wikimedia Foundation is an entity, but they specifically state that they are not publishers.
This is always an important distinction. I'm afraid that its subtlety escapes many people who refuse to understand that Wikipedia does not exist. ;-)
Ec