The result of this, by the way, is that
commercial entities sell modified
versions of Wikidata with impunity. It undermines the terms of other
resources such as DBPedia, which also contains facts extracted from
Wikipedia and respects its Share-Alike terms. Why would anyone use
and have to agree to share alike, when they can
get similar data from
Wikidata which promises them it's CC-0?
The comparison to DBpedia is interesting: the terms for DBpedia state
"Attribution in this case means keep DBpedia URIs visible and active
through at least one (preferably all) of @href, <link />, or "Link:". If
live links are impossible (e.g., when printed on paper), a textual
blurb-based attribution is acceptable."
So according to these terms, when someone displays data from DBpedia, it
is entirely sufficient to attribute DBpedia.
What that means is that DBpedia follows exactly the same theory as
Wikidata: it is OK to extract data from Wikipedia and republish it as your
own dataset under your own copyright without requiring attribution to the
original source of the extraction.
(A bit more problematic might be the fact that DBpedia also republishes
whole paragraphs of Text under these terms, but that's another story)
My understanding is that all that Wikidata has extracted from Wikipedia is
non-copyrightable in the first place and thus republishing it under a
different license (or, as in the case of DBpedia for simple triples, with a
different attribution) is legally sound.
In the SmartDataWeb project
we hired lawyers
to write a legal review about the extraction situation. Facts can be
extracted and republished under CC-0 without problem as is the case of
infoboxes.. Copying a whole database is a different because database rights
hold. If you only extract ~ two sentences it falls under citation, which is
also easy. If it is more than two sentence, then copyright applies.
I can check whether it is ready and shareable. The legal review
(Gutachten) is quite a big thing as it has some legal relevancy and can be
cited in court.
Hence we can switch to ODC-BY with facts as CC-0 and the text as
share-alike. However the attribution mentioned in the imprint is still
fine, since it is under database and not the content/facts.
I am still uncertain about the attribution. If you remix and publish you
need to cite the direct sources. But if somebody takes from you, does he
only attribute to you or to everybody you used in a transitive way.
Anyhow, we are sharpening the whole model towards technology, not
data/content. So the databus will be a transparent layer and it is much
easier to find the source like Wikipedia and Wikidata and do contributions
there, which is actually one of the intentions of share-alike (getting work
pushed back/upstream).
All the best,
Sebastian
If there is disagreement with that, I would be interested which content
exactly is considered to be under copyright and where license has not been
followed on Wikidata.
For completion: the discussion is going on in parallel on the Wikidata
project chat and in Phabricator:
I would appreciate if we could keep the discussion in a single place.
Gnom1 on Phabricator has offered to actually answer legal questions, but
we need to come up with the questions that we want to ask. If it should be,
for example, as Rob Speer states on the bug, "has the copyright of
interwiki links been breached by having them be moved to Wikidata?", I'd be
quite happy with that question - if that's the disagreement, let us ask
Legal help and see if my understanding or yours is correct.
Does this sound like a reasonable question? Or which other question would
you like to ask instead?
On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 4:15 PM Rob Speer <rob(a)luminoso.com> wrote:
As
always, copyright is predatory. As we can prove that copyright is the
enemy of
science and knowledge
Well, this kind of gets to the heart of the issue, doesn't it.
I support the Creative Commons license, including the share-alike term,
which requires copyright in order to work, and I've contributed to
multiple
Wikimedia projects with the understanding that my work would be protected
by CC-By-SA.
Wikidata is engaged in a project-wide act of disobedience against
CC-By-SA.
I would say that GerardM has provided an excellent summary of the attitude
toward Creative Commons that I've encountered on Wikidata: "it's holding
us
back", "it's the enemy", "you can't copyright
knowledge", "you can't make
us follow it", etc.
The result of this, by the way, is that commercial entities sell modified
versions of Wikidata with impunity. It undermines the terms of other
resources such as DBPedia, which also contains facts extracted from
Wikipedia and respects its Share-Alike terms. Why would anyone use DBPedia
and have to agree to share alike, when they can get similar data from
Wikidata which promises them it's CC-0?
On Wed, 16 May 2018 at 21:43 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hoi,
Thank you for the overly broad misrepresentation. As always, copyright
is
predatory. As we can prove that copyright is the
enemy of science and
knowledge we should not be upset that *copyright *is abused we should
welcome it as it proves the point. Also when we use texts from
everywhere
and rephrase it in Wikipedia articles
"we" are not lily white either.
In "them old days" generally we felt that when people would use
Wikipedia,
it would only serve our purpose; share the sum of
all knowledge. I still
feel really good about that. And, it has been shown that what we do;
maintain / curate / update that data that it is not easily given to do
as
well as "we" do it.
When we are to be more precise with our copyright, there are a few
things
we could do to make copyright more transparent.
When data is to be
uploaded
(Commons / Wikipedia or Wikidata) we should use a
user that is OWNED and
operated by the copyright holder. The operation may be by proxy and as a
consequence there is no longer a question about copyright as the
copyright
holder can do as we wants. This makes any future
noises just that,
annoying.
As to copyright on Wikidata, when you consider copyright using data from
Wikipedia. The question is: "What Wikipedia" I have copied a lot of data
from several Wikipedias and believe me, from a quality point of view
there
is much to be gained by using Wikidata as an
instrument for good
because it
is really strong in identifying friends and false
friends. It is
superior
as a tool for disambiguation.
About the copyright on data, the overriding question with data is: do
you
copy data wholesale in Wikidata. That is what a
database copyright is
about. As I wrote on my blog [1], the best data to include is data that
is
corroborated by the fact that it is present in
multiple sources. This
negates the notion of a single source, it also underscores that much of
the
data everywhere is replicated a lot. It also
underscores, again, the
notion
that data that is only present in single sources
is what needs
attention.
It needs tender loving care, it needs other
sources to establish
credentials. That is in its own right what makes any claim of copyright
moot. It is in this process that it becomes a "creative" process
negating
the copyright held on databases.
I welcome the attention that is given to copyright in Wikidata. However
our
attention to copyright is predatory in two ways.
It is how can we get
around existing copyright and how can we protect our own. As argued,
Wikidata shines when it is used for what it is intended to be; the place
that brings data, of Wikipedias first and elsewhere second, together to
be
used as a repository of quality, open and linked
data.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2018/05/wikidata-copyright-and-linked-d…
On 11 May 2018 at 23:10, Rob Speer <rob(a)luminoso.com> wrote:
Wow, thanks for the heads up. When I was getting
upset about projects
that
change the license on Wikimedia content and
commercialize it, I had no
idea
> that Wikidata was providing them the cover to do so. The Creative
Commons
violation
is coming from inside the house!
On Tue, 8 May 2018 at 03:48 mathieu stumpf guntz <
psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> There is a phabricator ticket on Solve legal uncertainty of Wikidata
> <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193728> that you might be
interested
> > to look at and participate in.
> >
> > As Denny suggested in the ticket to give it more visibility through
the
> > discussion on the Wikidata chat
> > <
> >
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#
> Importing_datasets_under_incompatible_licenses>,
> >
> > I thought it was interesting to highlight it a bit more.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
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All the best,
Sebastian Hellmann
Director of Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT)
Competence Center
at the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) at Leipzig University
Executive Director of the DBpedia Association
Projects: