Re: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

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Re: [Foundation-l] GFDL and...

Mike Godwin

21 Nov 2007 21 Nov '07

1:09 p.m.

luke brandt writes:

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CZ have always promised to be _open content_ and [[open content]] can be -NC. At least WP says it can. As a non-profit project isn't Wikipedia free to use NC if it wishes, though re-users would have to be warned. -- luke

Even though we ourselves are a non-profit, we wouldn't be able to feed NC content to for-profit enterprises, which is something we do now. --Mike

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Anthony

21 Nov 21 Nov

9:55 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

On Nov 21, 2007 8:09 AM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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luke brandt writes:

Even though we ourselves are a non-profit, we wouldn't be able to feed NC content to for-profit enterprises, which is something we do now.

Larry thinks not only will CZ be allowed to do that, but they'll be allowed to charge those for-profit enterprises licensing fees for it. I kind of doubt he's received much in the way of legal advice, considering some of the crazy things he's said in the past about copyright and licenses.

Thomas Dalton

10:09 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

...

David Goodman

22 Nov 22 Nov

4:51 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

and why I haven't contributed significantly besides moving and fixing up things from wikipedia--for them, at least I know where i stand about the license. On 11/21/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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He's either not thinking, or thinking about getting contributors to give CZ extra rights in addition to what everyone gets (under CC-BY-NC or whatever). The fact that he launched the site before giving licenses much thought would suggest the former... (the lack of a decision on licenses is why I haven't contributed anything to CZ). _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.

Stephen Bain

5:14 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

On Nov 22, 2007 3:51 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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and why I haven't contributed significantly besides moving and fixing up things from wikipedia--for them, at least I know where i stand about the license.

Yes, they'll have to delete all of those if they pick anything other than the GFDL. -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

Fred Bauder

5:32 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

Actually, no. They could retain those articles under GFDL. But have all others which did not contain text from Wikipedia under some other license. Consider copyright from the perspective of each article. Fred

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On Nov 22, 2007 3:51 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

and why I haven't contributed significantly besides moving and fixing up things from wikipedia--for them, at least I know where i stand about the license.

Yes, they'll have to delete all of those if they pick anything other than the GFDL. -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

David Gerard

8:58 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

On 22/11/2007, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:

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This is what they're doing. There's a "From Wikipedia?" flag on each article. There are also those who work to get Wikipedia content removed from articles, which is arguably a good idea - the GFDL is a crappy licence for a wiki way of working. - d.

Thomas Dalton

12:09 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

On 22/11/2007, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:

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Yes, that certainly seems to be their intention. It's going to really complicate matters though. GFDL being viral means that any article containing a single sentence from a GFDL article (give or take fair use, I guess) must be entirely under GFDL, so if they start moving articles around and merging them, they're going to end up with a large portion of the site under GFDL. "Viral" is a really good word for it - it's going to end up spreading just like a virus until they have an epidemic on their hands and the whole thing is GFDL.

David Gerard

12:51 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

On 22/11/2007, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Individual sentence formations may or may not be of enforceable copyright, and in any case English sentences are readily shuffled about. The GFDL isn't so viral that someone bringing a copyright case could readily claim violation of text that wasn't in the text being sued over. (YMMV etc.) - d.

Thomas Dalton

12:56 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

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Yes, chances are they can dilute the viral nature by dual licensing the parts of articles that don't have to be GFDL. It requires keeping accurate track of what parts of what articles come from where, though.

Anthony

2:07 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

On Nov 22, 2007 7:09 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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On 22/11/2007, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:

If they go with a non-GFDL license for non-Wikipedia content, they should probably eliminate the Wikipedia-based articles completely. It's relatively minor to rewrite the article in your own words if you're going to go through and fact-check everything anyway. Using a two-step process where one person extracts the facts (after checking the sources) and then a second person writes the article from those facts would probably be even easier. In that sense going with a non-GFDL license could actually be an advantage, as it'd encourage people to do more than just copy/paste. (*) Of course, I think that non-GFDL license should actually be a free [TM] one :). I'm one of those ones who has significantly cut down on contributions to Citizendium after hearing rumblings about the license possibly not being a free [TM] one. (*) I guess it could be said that this process could in itself violate copyright on the collection of facts, but realistically if you're porting to another free [TM] license and you acknowledge Wikipedia as a source I don't think anyone would even try to sue, let alone win a lawsuit. (**) I use [TM] next to free because another one of Larry's "eccentricities" is that he insists that an NC license is a free license. I think it's obvious what I mean by free, but in case you're not sure, see http://freedomdefined.org/, that's essentially my use of the term.

David Goodman

7:09 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

Fair use applies to material published under GFDL as it does to material published under any license, or with no license at all, so one could quote a reasonable amount of GFDL material in an article under a more restrictive license published in Citizendium. At the beginning,Citizendium encouraged the use of WP as a starting point to get some content at all, but has gradually changed the rules to discouraging it, though not yet forbidding it. The idea seems to be to encourage the sort of non-fiction academic-oriented writers who dont really buy into the idea of wikis. Perhaps Wikipedia should be going in the opposite direction, of orienting the license to diminish the extent of ownership of individuals in one's own contributions--one contributes one'ss work under the understanding that the entire work as a whole be published as GFDL, but has no remaining right in the individual sentences one contributes. On 11/22/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:

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On Nov 22, 2007 7:09 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 22/11/2007, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:

-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.

Anthony

23 Nov 23 Nov

1:42 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

On Nov 22, 2007 2:09 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Yes, as long as you attribute the source I think you could get away with a lot. We're talking about a non-fiction encyclopedic work distributed for free over the Internet, so that's three of the four fair use criteria in your favor right there. Of course, the same would presumably apply to the material published in Citizendium, so the effectiveness of that restrictive license would be equally limited. I think Larry's way off when he suggests that "CBS, Fox, the New York Times, English tabloids, Chinese propaganda sheets, Yahoo!, Google, and all sorts of giant new media companies" will be willing to pay large sums of money to license Citizendium content if it's under CC-BY-NC. They'll just use the content under fair use and/or use Wikipedia content instead. In fact, if Citizendium becomes authoritative as they plan on doing, media companies are going to prefer to cite and attribute quotes from it rather than presenting its content as their own.

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Anthony
David Gerard
David Goodman
Fred Bauder
Mike Godwin
Stephen Bain
Thomas Dalton