Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a license incompatible with all of their existing licenses. That rules out any likely form of copyleft if the project is to achieve its major goal, though with sufficient studying of all of the contracts news publishers have with their new sources I suppose it's conceivable that some form of copyleft license could be written to be incompatible with a small enough set of them for small publishers to use stories.
Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.
-----Original Message----- From: Mathias Schindler neubau@presroi.de To: Robin Shannon robin.shannon@gmail.com, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@wikimedia.org Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 13:22:13 +0100 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing
Robin Shannon wrote:
Well i have contributed 2 articles to wikinews so far, and one of them i lifted (more or less) straight from wikipedia (from an article that was written about 5 minutes before i sat down to write). I can think that there would be plenty of times when lifting a paragraph or so from wikipedia would be useful in wikinews. Hence while i would like it to be PD, i think that GFDL (provided that becomes CC-BY-SA complient sometime) would be the most practical.
Yesterday, ddp, a medium sized news agency copied [[de:Misshandlung]] from wikipedia 1:1 and sent it over their channel. They didn't even try to stick to the GNU FDL and it took me some time to explain copyright to them.
I will not participate in a PD wikinews that does not ensure that free text remains free. CC-BY-SA does not block newspapers from using the content and because of the <buzzword>synergy</buzzword> hopes regarding wikipedia, i suggest a dual licensing of GFDL and CC-BY-SA (keeping in mind that these two should merge some day...)
Mathias
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user_Jamesday wrote:
Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a license incompatible with all of their existing licenses. That rules out any likely form of copyleft if the project is to achieve its major goal, though with sufficient studying of all of the contracts news publishers have with their new sources I suppose it's conceivable that some form of copyleft license could be written to be incompatible with a small enough set of them for small publishers to use stories.
Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.
I've been lurking on here and I felt I need to respond to this message.
Copyleft is not to limit people who can use a work (like software or a book), but rather a way to force attribution and to avoid pitfalls of the "public domain" documents. If it is in the "public domain", all you have to do is a minor change and suddenly the work can now be copyrighted. The publisher does not have to clarify what is free material that can be copied and what is original new material. An example of this is the Clement C. Moore Poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas", which is in the public domain (due to copyright expiration), but often they change the final phrase from "Happy Christmas" to "Merry Christmas", call it a new work, and copyright the book. To enforce it more, publishers also include new illustrations of Santa, but if you read inside the cover there is no mention that the poem itself is in the public domain.
This is where the GFDL is very different, as anything that copies a GFDL licenced document must also specify somehow what rights you have as an end consumer. The same is true for GPL'd software as well.
Even the BSD license (which has almost no real restrictions) does have the attribution clause that forces you to acknowledge from whom you got the document and that it is copyrighted material.
And in the case of "mainstream" news agencies, including television & radio stations (as well as print media), when they cover something from a wire agency they almost always give attribution in the form of "According to the Associated Press" or "from wire reports" or "as published in a copyrighted article in the Washington Post". In this case Wikinews has the potential of becoming another news outlet where newspapers would start out with something like "Moscow (Wikinews) - President Putin..."
Where I think the license discussion should go along is to discuss what features authors would like to see, what features from common copyleft licenses most people here hate, and what the overall goals of the project are. A copyleft license can be applied to a news article that could also be republished by "mainstream" news outlets.... the two are not mutually incompatable. Unfortunately most of the discussion I've seen so far is going into the gritty details and political camps of each different license.
IMHO, I think a simple attribution that the story came from Wikinews, and in print media something in a little more detail giving either a URL to Wikinews or a statement in the copyright section of the publication (most magazines and newspapers have them buried on page 3 or on the editorial page somewhere... usually in very fine print) that says Wikinews articles are republished under the XXX license. see http://www.example.com for more details. Web magazines can do something very similar (as well as websites for mainstream news organizations that want to republish wikinews pieces). Television news broadcasts typically have a quick blurb at the end giving credit to news sources, especially if it is from another network or station. These usually scroll by so quickly that you can hardly read them, but are a way to give attribution.
The point here is to acknowledge that somebody other than that news agency created the story, and they are only republishing what can be obtained elsewhere as a convience to their readers. I don't see how this really limits who or how you can use content that is copylefted, and is incompatable with commercial news wire licenses only if those other licenses specifically mention that they can't be used together with other wire services or specifically mention copylefted news articles used simultaneously in the same publication. It is likely that at least in the USA such prohibitions could also be made illegal due to anti-trust laws, and I know the EU also has simular anti-competition laws as well, protecting a small-town newspaper that might want to use Wikinews articles in their publication (for instance).
user_Jamesday wrote:
Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.
I don't disagree with much of what you said, but I wanted to add a different perspective to what copyleft does. In many cases it does *not* limit the people who can use the work, but rather serves as an easy way to persuade them to make their own work available under a free license as well.
--Jimbo
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
user_Jamesday wrote:
Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.
I don't disagree with much of what you said, but I wanted to add a different perspective to what copyleft does. In many cases it does *not* limit the people who can use the work, but rather serves as an easy way to persuade them to make their own work available under a free license as well.
I don't really see how it limits news companies either. Nearly all of their news sources are not public-domain, but subject to much more restrictive licenses. For example, if they want to republish Associated Press stories, they must pay the Associated Press considerable sums of money. All copyleft asks is that if they want to republish our stories, that they allow us in turn to republish any modifications they make to them. I don't believe it would require them to GFDL their entire newspaper, only the story that they're using from us.
-Mark
--- user_Jamesday user_Jamesday@myrealbox.com wrote:
Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a license incompatible with all of their existing licenses.
Not so. The license will only affect whatever article they copy. If the CC-by-sa is used, then all they need do is add an attribution line at the end of the article and mention of the license. Extending the same rights to users of their version as we have given to them is not asking much at all. Pretty darn cheap price in fact.
More at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikinews/License_straw_poll
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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----- Original Message ----- From: Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 01:23:51 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing
The license will only affect whatever article they copy. If the CC-by-sa is used, then all they need do is add an attribution line at the end of the article and mention of the license. Extending the same rights to users of their version as we have given to them is not asking much at all. Pretty darn cheap price in fact.
I have the same feeling as mav that complying with CC-by-sa is not very much difficult. I see that easier than complying with GFDL. But there are stil some requirements in CC-by-sa that would deter mainstream media from using Wikinews contents. (I attach details of problems of GFDL and CC-by-sa at the end of this email). One is the attribution requirement, because some Wikinews articles have many authors.
That makes me think that 1) CC-sa might be better for this project, if people do not care for getting credits. 2) A custom-made license based on CC-sa, but allowing derivative works relicensed under other licenses including GFDL and CC-by-sa is possibly even a better option.
If we give up attribution requirements, we could lose some potential contributors. That is bad. But at the same time, if attribution requirements cannot reasonably be enforced, or enforcing it would make potential reusers give up our contents, that could well be worse.
Regards,
Tomos
Attachment:
Here are major problems that I can see with GFDL when a mainstream press wants to use Wikinews article with some modification.
But please be aware that I am not a lawyer.
Creative Commons' Attribution-ShareAlike is free of many of these potential problems, but importantly, it is not free from the #2 &5.
1) Sec. 1, 4-B, & 4-C Creating Title Page and offering certain information in the page. According to the GFDL, "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." Title Page should include a list of author(s) of the modified version and at least five of the principal authors of the previous versions. It should also include the name of the publisher of the modified version.
I think this alone could be a big deterrent for mainstream print press. (And think how unprofessional it would look like if they see names like Tomos among the authors...I better change my username if GFDL is selected.)
2) Sec. 4-I. To preserve history. An article could be edited by 5, 10, or more times. GFDL requires them to list all of them. This requirement is not as bad for Wikinews as for Wikipedia, because the avarage # of editors are smaller.
As a sidenote, one active participant at English Wikinews recently made a remark that a quality article would take 5 to 10 people involved in the process. I personally had the same estimate. ( http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Quality_over_Quantity )
3) Sec. 4-J. To preserve network locations of all previous versions of the document.
4) Sec. 3. To offer the work without copy & access protection measures. This increases handling costs of the Wikinews-derived articles. They would need some special arrangements in order to offer the Wikinews-derived articles in subscription-based, protected database services or sell those articles to database companies offering such services. If there are enough useful articles from Wikinews, that would be worth.
5) License interpretation uncertainties - the above requirements are based on the interpretation that each individual article is a work. Some people think the whole wiki is a single work. In that case, the reusers have to do things differently because its authors & its history could be different.
6) Uncertainty regarding the scope of permission. GFDL may or may not include performance rights-related permissions, such as broadcasting an audio news clip online or offline. (It clearly covers reproduction, modification, distribution, and translation.) CC-by-sa does include permission to "publicly perform" and "publicly digitally perform" among its license grants. (I got this idea from Carbuncle's blog, to his credit. And if you don't know, he is a Japanese Wikipedian. http://carbuncle.blogtribe.org/entry-bd867be802a865689471b5876e86af31.html)
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