On 8/23/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Whether or not they are is a question which can only truly be answered by a court. 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(a)gmail.com> wrote: Section 4.

On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)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.

On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> 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.

Maybe. You could consider the URL to be the title, in which case they are distinct. 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 publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places. 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? What? Every page has a history... what are you talking about?

On 24/08/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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 24/08/07, Kat Walsh <kat(a)mindspillage.org> wrote: 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 24/08/07, Kat Walsh <kat(a)mindspillage.org> 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...........

Thomas Dalton schreef: 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. 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.) 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. 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. 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(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, if you consider the URL to be the title, then every modified version of the page has the same title. 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? Surely not. Wikipedia is not an entity. The Wikimedia Foundation is an entity, but they specifically state that they are not publishers. 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. 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.

On 8/24/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: 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. 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: 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(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: 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&print…

On 8/24/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. 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, 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: No problem. Your past quotation practices have been tended to foreshoten the background to what you say a little too much. 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

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).