Thomas Dalton writes:
>
>>> While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral
>>> rights?
>>
>> More or less.
>
> The "or less" is the bit you need to worry about, then.
Wow, thanks.
>>> The thing with experts is that you often need to contact them in
>>> order
>>> to find out if there is anything worth contacting them about.
>>
>> This had never occurred to me!
>
> Perhaps you should try thinking things through properly in future,
> then.
>
> (NB: Claiming a statement is sarcastic does not making it false. From
> your previous email is quite clear that your statements in this email
> are true despite the fact that you most likely believe you are being
> sarcastic.)
I am truly impressed, not only with your exceptional knowledge of
moral-rights jurisprudence, but also with your assessment of my legal
abilities and your insightful interpretation of my comments. It's a
wonder that I ever managed to accomplish anything without the insight
of Thomas Dalton, especially with regard to this tricky copyright stuff.
It's true, Thomas -- I'm a dope, and I need your wisdom to straighten
me out.
--Mike
Hoi,
On Meta in the "Request for new languages" there is a separate page with
information about each request. These pages include a template that gives
the language committee the necessary information to evaluate the request.
Part of the template is a field tagged as "*Users interested in forming an
editing community*:" A month ago it came to my attention that several
requests did not include this field. Consequently it is not possible to
judge if there are indeed people willing to support such a request. At the
time I added this field and added ????.
Given that requests for new languages, new projects require people to
actually DO something, this information is crucial because otherwise we have
only people "voting" on the idea of the proposed project. As it is one of
the requirements for a project to have an active community, I am of a mind
to reject any request that does not indicate the people who are willing to
actively support a request.
Please add your details to the request that you will commit yourself to.
NB I made this same request / announcement on the Incubator..
Thanks,
GerardM
Thomas Dalton writes:
> There is a difference between being aware of an issue and knowing how
> that issue affects each jurisdiction.
Hey! Thanks for letting me know about that!
> While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral rights?
More or less.
> The thing with experts is that you often need to contact them in order
> to find out if there is anything worth contacting them about.
This had never occurred to me!
--Mike
Best I can tell the last official statement from the FSF on the GSFDL
was over two years ago (back when we were running mediawiki 1.7) there
have been the odd unofficial statements but they came to nothing. This
being the case we must assume the GSFDL is dead or so comatose as to
be out of the picture (not entirely a bad thing the license was
painfully bad).
The moves to try and get some form of CC-BY-SA /GFDL merger appear to
have ground to a halt.
So what can we do. Ignoring the situation isn't a long term viable option.
There is the stick. We could prevent say further GFDL only image
uploads and produce a press release explaining why.
Other options are putting together a group to actively lobby the FSF
to get something done but I'm not sure they would react to that to
well.
So what to do?
--
geni
Thomas Dalton writes:
> The legal implications do certainly need to be considered, however.
> Moral rights to attribution may well get in the way. Mike Godwin can
> advise on US law, but someone needs to make official contact with
> lawyers in other jurisdictions and get advice.
FWIW, any lawyer who deals with copyright in any kind of international
environment is aware of moral-rights issues. If specific questions and
concerns come up, of course, I have a network of international lawyers
I can reach out to.
> This mailing list is not the place for a detailed discussion
> of the law, but that discussion does need to take place (between WMF,
> CC, FSF and lots and lots of lawyers from all over the world - this
> will probably cost a lot of money since you'll be lucky to find people
> willing to work pro-bono is every significant jurisdiction, but is
> essential).
I don't think you're correct to suppose that "lots and lots of
lawyers" are required. Copyright is, after all, very largely
harmonized among very many nations as a result of several
international agreements. Also, since United States is a bit of an
outlier when it comes to enforcement of moral rights, we wouldn't
impose a U.S. norm on how to interpret or understand moral rights of
attribution. In implementation, as it happens, I think the moral-
rights issue will turn out to be less of a practical problem than you
imagine (because I don't think attribution problems will generate
enough friction for us to worry about). Moral-rights issues tend to
arise when substantial authorship and attribution questions are
obvious and clear -- in short, not the kind of authorship and
attribution issues that normally arise in a collaborative enterprise
like a Wikimedia project.
--Mike
--Mike
I just got a reply from a lawyer about wp-content and other work on a
site, it is the "other" part that sparked the discussion (boring stuff
about somone that does not want to pay for some work), and they claim
that "all rights lies at (company), which is responsible for the site
and the continued operation of this (site)".
My question is, given that the content on this site comes from
Wikipedia, and is licensed gfdl, how can they claim that they have all
rights? Is this a violation of the license? I think it is if they try to
claim that they have ownership of the articles.
John
In my view Wikimedia should use standards. Where a language lacks a
639 code (and 639-3 is pretty robust) mechanisms exist which are NOT
draconian and overly time-consuming to add either formal codes or
formal subtags which CAN be used and which conform to standards.
If Wikimedia does anything else than follows standards in this area, I
think there ought to be a VERY VERY good reason why.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
Picking up from my earlier message about the board meeting, I still have
news about chapter-related items on our agenda. First of all, we
approved two new Wikimedia chapters, one in Indonesia and the other in
Brazil. Congratulations and welcome to both!
Another quick piece of business is that Frieda was the board's
representative on the chapters committee. We decided to replace her with
two people instead of just one - both Ting and Kat will be serving on
the committee. In a sense, Ting was chosen because of his interest in
the activity of existing chapters, making sure they function and are
properly supported at the foundation level, and Kat was chosen for her
interest in the building of new chapters, including sub-national ones.
But of course they are equally full members of the committee, not just
there for some specialized question.
What we did decide to do for specialized questions - specifically, the
sub-national chapters issue - is create a working group to help with
those. The board supports the development of sub-national chapters where
this makes sense. To the extent that official encouragement or approval
is still needed for this concept, it's there. We'll happily approve
sub-national chapters that the chapters committee recommends to us. (In
a way, you could say Hong Kong already is one.)
The working group will consist of Kat representing the board, Andrew
Whitworth representing the committee, and Erik representing the staff.
We anticipate that since this approach to creating chapters may prompt
new questions, we'd like the working group to help answer them, and to
give advice and support where needed. However, the working group is not
a separate or additional approval process. Sub-national chapters can
follow the same development process used by the existing chapters.
The staff also outlined a framework that may help deal with issues as
they come up. This document has been shared with the committee and the
other chapters previously. I'll pass along some of the preliminary
answers it offers to potential sub-national chapters questions in a
separate message.
--Michael Snow
I add (In language Proposal policy - communiy draft) a clause is for languages with
active wikis, but which Code has been invented: voro (fiu-vro), tarantino (roa-tara), Cantonese (zh-yue), min nan (zh-min-nan) , etc.
For new proposal those will continue using the same
invented code that are using.
The problem: Imagine that they will
use different codes [when get a ISO code or if they have: Min nan (nan), Cantonese (yue)] for new projects, the technical chaos that would
occur.
Please check it out:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy/Community_draft
C.m.l.
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