Massimiliano writes:
How could you add SA, for example, without being the original licensor, for importing to Wikipedia? How could you subtract it without being the original licensor(s), for importing to Knol?
As long as you put the author's credits, respecting in this way the request of attribution, you can change the license for your derivative works and this includes also adding a SA clause. At least this is what I have ever believed.
Sure, a sufficiently transformative derivative work might give you the ability to create a new license with strong copyleft. But that's not what we've been seeing on Knol or what we've been discussing here, it seems to me. Instead, we've been talking about importing and exporting whole articles.
--Mike
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:39 PM, Mike Godwin mgodwin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Sure, a sufficiently transformative derivative work might give you the ability to create a new license with strong copyleft. But that's not what we've been seeing on Knol or what we've been discussing here, it seems to me. Instead, we've been talking about importing and exporting whole articles.
It is the position of Creative Commons, as I understand it, that if I use a work which is licensed to me under the CC-BY license, I can then license my derivative work to others under CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-NC, GFDL, or any other license I choose that will preserve attribution of the author of the original work--or, indeed, I can choose not to grant any license at all to my work when distributing it. It seems to me that you are thinking of the sharealike licenses.
See also Question 2.15 of http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:53 PM, Tracy Poff tracy.poff@gmail.com wrote:
It is the position of Creative Commons, as I understand it, that if I use a work which is licensed to me under the CC-BY license, I can then license my derivative work to others under CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-NC, GFDL, or any other license I choose that will preserve attribution of the author of the original work
Well, playing devil's advocate for a moment, I could see one potential problem with adding CC-BY text into an already existing GFDL work... If CC-BY imposes *any* requirements not required by the GFDL, then you might have trouble with the "add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License" part.
I don't know of any such requirements, but I'm not willing to say it's impossible to find any.
In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is giving such limited license choices. I don't know for sure, of course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike licenses would have on embedded ads.
In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is giving such limited license choices. I don't know for sure, of course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike licenses would have on embedded ads.
Unless they're worried about reusers having embedded ads, I don't see a problem - Google require you to grant them a pretty wide ranging license in addition to whatever you give the public.
I know the following is not the current situation, but:
The only thing we have any real reason to insist on for Wikipedia content is attribution, and the only attribution that should be necessary is attribution to Wikipedia with a link to where exactly it was taken.
Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it. People do this with PD US government material routinely.)
I seriously doubt any contributor of Wikipedia text content really cares about individual attribution to his individual contribution. How could they, given that we permit any modification whatever, and the contribution will in most cases be entangled hopeless in hundreds of others. When you read the disclaimer, you know that you are leaving it open to be twisted in any manner whatsoever and used for purposes completely alien to yours. Sometimes I care that people preserve the attribution to me personally of something I write--in those cases I write for a more convention medium--and will usually ask not just BY, but NC. Most people care about those two concepts--they write for reputation, and if there's any money, they want some of it. But not when they write for Wikipedia. There's no money, and your contribution will be to the encyclopedia as a whole. Yes, some people say that they wrote certain articles, but the most they can really say is that they started them or wrote some of what remains in the content. You get no reputation from writing scattered sentences.
Illustrations I am told may be different. sounds reasonable--they carry individual licensing statements--though again I am puzzled, because they are open to any editing whatever. If a photographer contributes his art, he lets us distort it. The version he contributed, though, is still there.
There is a real point in advocating copyleft to change the world to the use of free content; I fully understand the desire to change the world to the merits of "libre" publishing. But maintaining it in Wikipedia is pointy--wp is there as an encyclopedia to be used, and the very thought that one could not take text and put it wherever you please is completely opposite to the spirit of contribution. Its the zealots and their legal ingenuity triumphing over commonsense and the need to actually provide a free encyclopedia in the way ordinary people mean "free". They're using the technicalities of their licenses to restrict content if other people want to use differently from the way they had in mind when they thought about how to develop non-commercial software. A brilliant innovation--but it should not apply to us.
NYBrad show the right way a good lawyer approaches things: decide what we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it. I'm not one, but I think the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what i expect, i hereby offer to do it.
On 7/31/08, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is giving such limited license choices. I don't know for sure, of course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike licenses would have on embedded ads.
Unless they're worried about reusers having embedded ads, I don't see a problem - Google require you to grant them a pretty wide ranging license in addition to whatever you give the public.
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On Friday 01 August 2008 06:01:08 David Goodman wrote:
Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it. People do this with PD US government material routinely.)
No. You are not free to make free content nonfree. I do not want to see things I wrote claimed as copyrighted by someone else, claimed to be not free or, the worst, translated and enhanced and claimed nonfree (which has actually happened).
we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it. I'm not one, but I think the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what i expect, i hereby offer to do it.
And if by "the freest possible" you mean CC-BY, I hereby offer to revert you.
Anything anybody writes can claim to be copyrighted by somebody else, so you might as well get used to the idea. Whether the claim is valid is another matter.
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 9:29 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
On Friday 01 August 2008 06:01:08 David Goodman wrote:
Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it. People do this with PD US government material routinely.)
No. You are not free to make free content nonfree. I do not want to see things I wrote claimed as copyrighted by someone else, claimed to be not free or, the worst, translated and enhanced and claimed nonfree (which has actually happened).
Anything anybody writes can claim to be copyrighted by somebody else, so you might as well get used to the idea. Whether the claim is valid is another matter.
we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it. I'm not one, but I think the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what i expect, i hereby offer to do it.
And if by "the freest possible" you mean CC-BY, I hereby offer to revert you.
I must misunderstand you. I can rewrite anything or anyone has ever posted on wp and doing so to avoid a claimed or even a possible copyright violation is one of the best reasons for doing so, whether or not there is an actual copyvio.
If you mean I propose to change the rules personally, I know perfectly well that I cannot do this.
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On Friday 01 August 2008 19:31:06 David Goodman wrote:
No. You are not free to make free content nonfree. I do not want to see things I wrote claimed as copyrighted by someone else, claimed to be not free or, the worst, translated and enhanced and claimed nonfree (which has actually happened).
Anything anybody writes can claim to be copyrighted by somebody else, so you might as well get used to the idea. Whether the claim is valid is another matter.
I am used to the idea, and I am actively opposing it.
David,
You are advocating a view of what freedom should mean. Being free to do absolutely ANYTHING with Wikipedia content as long as you attribute it to Wikipedia is a perfectly respectable view.
However, there is segment of the community, myself included, that doesn't feel comfortable with that level of radical freedom. Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't really want to donate my time and energy to a project if it is likely that someone else will pick it up, add a few widgets and a little text, and exploit it for private financial gain while give nothing back to me or Wikipedia.
Strong copyleft gives me the protection that full-scale financial exploitation with no return is unlikely. Strong copyleft leads to the expectation that I and others will also be able to benefit from the content that others subsequently add to my work.
I realize it often feels like people writing for Wikipedia are giving our efforts away for nothing, but in my mind we are buying reciprocity. We are buying the expectation that as others improve our work we will ultimately be free to benefit from that as well.
If Wikipedia were simply CC-BY (or the equivalent), that would be a big turn-off for someone like me.
Radical freedom comes with trade-offs. Truly free content is more useful, but I don't think the encyclopedia would have as extensive an editor community if we dropped the copyleft provisions from our license. And without a large community, we wouldn't have the same size and scope we have today.
Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe a truly free encyclopedia would do just as well (or even better) at attracting contributers, but I wouldn't count on it.
-Robert Rohde
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:01 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I know the following is not the current situation, but:
The only thing we have any real reason to insist on for Wikipedia content is attribution, and the only attribution that should be necessary is attribution to Wikipedia with a link to where exactly it was taken.
Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it. People do this with PD US government material routinely.)
I seriously doubt any contributor of Wikipedia text content really cares about individual attribution to his individual contribution. How could they, given that we permit any modification whatever, and the contribution will in most cases be entangled hopeless in hundreds of others. When you read the disclaimer, you know that you are leaving it open to be twisted in any manner whatsoever and used for purposes completely alien to yours. Sometimes I care that people preserve the attribution to me personally of something I write--in those cases I write for a more convention medium--and will usually ask not just BY, but NC. Most people care about those two concepts--they write for reputation, and if there's any money, they want some of it. But not when they write for Wikipedia. There's no money, and your contribution will be to the encyclopedia as a whole. Yes, some people say that they wrote certain articles, but the most they can really say is that they started them or wrote some of what remains in the content. You get no reputation from writing scattered sentences.
Illustrations I am told may be different. sounds reasonable--they carry individual licensing statements--though again I am puzzled, because they are open to any editing whatever. If a photographer contributes his art, he lets us distort it. The version he contributed, though, is still there.
There is a real point in advocating copyleft to change the world to the use of free content; I fully understand the desire to change the world to the merits of "libre" publishing. But maintaining it in Wikipedia is pointy--wp is there as an encyclopedia to be used, and the very thought that one could not take text and put it wherever you please is completely opposite to the spirit of contribution. Its the zealots and their legal ingenuity triumphing over commonsense and the need to actually provide a free encyclopedia in the way ordinary people mean "free". They're using the technicalities of their licenses to restrict content if other people want to use differently from the way they had in mind when they thought about how to develop non-commercial software. A brilliant innovation--but it should not apply to us.
NYBrad show the right way a good lawyer approaches things: decide what we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it. I'm not one, but I think the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what i expect, i hereby offer to do it.
On 7/31/08, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is giving such limited license choices. I don't know for sure, of course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike licenses would have on embedded ads.
Unless they're worried about reusers having embedded ads, I don't see a problem - Google require you to grant them a pretty wide ranging license in addition to whatever you give the public.
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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 12:04 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
... Strong copyleft gives me the protection that full-scale financial exploitation with no return is unlikely.
This is drifting off topic, but...
This particular argument against the less restrictive -BY type licenses for open content does not make sense in the real world of how authors are compensated for work, when they work for compensation.
Those authors who have started actively freely releasing their older works, or newer / upcoming works, have seen increases in sales for those works.
Additionally, a number of authors have ancedotally indicated that they both sold previously unsold work they published openly, and gotten inquiries and new business for commissioned work out of having publicized themselves in that manner.
The idea that "I have to license this to prevent (unnamed huge media conglomerate) from making money off my Wikipedia article" is silly. Someone trying to publish a print set of Wikipedia for normal print rates would fail - it's free on the web. Including an article or parts of an article in a larger work of some sort wouldn't be the sort of wholesale financial rip-off that many feel it is... a normal author makes five to ten cents a word in advance (and often no more than the advance) for most types of writing, to bound the problem. A 500 word WP article is therefor something that a publishing house would compensate $25 - 50 to have an author write it from scratch.
I would rather forego $50 and get my name out there (free advertising for my writing abilities!).
Professional writers either are falling into the "Don't redistribute my stuff at all" camp (old writers, some new ones), and "Here, take it, I own copyright but please give this to your friends" camp. Also somewhat distinguished by genre.
The "copyleft" -SA type licenses are not seemingly relevant to actual compensation for writing. If anything, they seem to by counterproductive, by inhibiting the types of reuse which would be likely to effectively publicize one as a good writer (denying you your share of the free publicity associated with writing it in the first place) without giving any significant chance of actually receiving direct compensation of note for the writing itself.
I don't object to people holding that intellectual opinion. But I think that those who do are in fact shooting yourselves in the foot on the practical "might make money off this" sense. I think you've trapped yourselves in a 1980s vintage philosophy that has failed on actual application to the real world. If you want to make money off writing, any of your writing, you need to talk to and look at what people who write for a living do with their intellectual property. I believe Cory Doctrow's viewpoint is far more relevant than Richard Stallman's on this point.
This is completely unrelated to the "keeping it free and open" justification for GFDL / -SA type licenses, of course.
It is not the case that you can't make money from a print version of something that is available on line for free. Case in point: philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an article in the 1980s in an academic journal. It eventually made its way to an unrestricted website where one could freely download it. Nonethless, a publisher, just a couple years ago, published the thing as a little book, with the same title and with not a single change, and it sold over 350,000 copies and got a huge amount of publicity for the author (and the essay). The title of the book/essay is On Bullshit.
Of course, Cory Doctorow makes the same point about his own work, which he makes available for free on line.
--- On Fri, 8/1/08, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote: From: George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, August 1, 2008, 1:38 PM
... The idea that "I have to license this to prevent (unnamed huge media conglomerate) from making money off my Wikipedia article" is silly. Someone trying to publish a print set of Wikipedia for normal print rates would fail - it's free on the web.
If you thought I was suggesting you can't make money off freely published work, I didn't mean to leave that impression at all... Practical experience over the last decade is that one clearly can make a lot of money that way.
In the speculative fiction arena, Cory is one well known example. Somewhat less well known author Eric Flint freely released one of his early novels on the web in the mid-90s, after it had been out for several years - there was a statistically significant *rise* in its sales immediately, and the rest of his books showed a sales increase as well. I have informally heard that he thinks that between 25 and 40% of his sales have been driven by him openly releasing things. John Scalzi sold a speculative fiction book that he wrote for fun and serialized on his blog to a major publisher, and now is both critically acclaimed and one of the better paid speculative fiction writers with a number of genre bestseller list books.
My point was that -SA / GFDL type licensing doesn't help turn free web publishing into money, and may hurt your chances to do that.
-george william herbert
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Mary Murrell mary_murrell@yahoo.com wrote:
It is not the case that you can't make money from a print version of something that is available on line for free. Case in point: philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an article in the 1980s in an academic journal. It eventually made its way to an unrestricted website where one could freely download it. Nonethless, a publisher, just a couple years ago, published the thing as a little book, with the same title and with not a single change, and it sold over 350,000 copies and got a huge amount of publicity for the author (and the essay). The title of the book/essay is On Bullshit.
Of course, Cory Doctorow makes the same point about his own work, which he makes available for free on line.
--- On Fri, 8/1/08, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote: From: George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, August 1, 2008, 1:38 PM
... The idea that "I have to license this to prevent (unnamed huge media conglomerate) from making money off my Wikipedia article" is silly. Someone trying to publish a print set of Wikipedia for normal print rates would fail - it's free on the web.
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I don't doubt this statement, but do wonder if you have a citation for it...?
Philippe
_____________________ Philippe Beaudette Tulsa, OK philippebeaudette@gmail.com
On Aug 1, 2008, at 3:38 PM, George Herbert wrote:
Those authors who have started actively freely releasing their older works, or newer / upcoming works, have seen increases in sales for those works.
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Philippe Beaudette philippebeaudette@gmail.com wrote:
I don't doubt this statement, but do wonder if you have a citation for it...?
But of course.
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos6
Not exactly an academic text, but it's by one of the authors (Eric Flint) who believes (and has numbers to support) that his income is strongly helped by making his writing available freely on the web...
Thanks... i look forward to reading that... I've been looking for some numbers one way or 'tother on that.
_____________________ Philippe Beaudette Tulsa, OK philippebeaudette@gmail.com
On Aug 1, 2008, at 4:13 PM, George Herbert wrote:
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Philippe Beaudette philippebeaudette@gmail.com wrote:
I don't doubt this statement, but do wonder if you have a citation for it...?
But of course.
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos6
Not exactly an academic text, but it's by one of the authors (Eric Flint) who believes (and has numbers to support) that his income is strongly helped by making his writing available freely on the web...
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:13 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.comwrote:
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Philippe Beaudette philippebeaudette@gmail.com wrote:
I don't doubt this statement, but do wonder if you have a citation for it...?
But of course.
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos6
Not exactly an academic text, but it's by one of the authors (Eric Flint) who believes (and has numbers to support) that his income is strongly helped by making his writing available freely on the web...
There is a large difference, at least in my mind, between choosing to give away text or music to others for them to read/listen to, and giving it away in such a manner that they repackage and republish it without needing the original author's consent.
Using "free" content as a marketing tool or as a means to drive other sources of revenue (e.g. web ads), is certainly a legitimate publishing tool and one that is commonly used. However, I think if you ask Jim Baen Books about whether you can republish their books without paying royalties, then they will flatly deny such a request. Copyleft works generally are more "free" to the public than the "free" books and music people give away. In other words the public can not only enjoy them, but also build upon them.
I suspect that most of the authors you cite as benefitting from giving away free works nonetheless have an expectation that "free" means less than the concept of radical freedom that started this diversionary thread.
As Wikipedians, I think we are all committed to giving away the content (i.e. no fees for reading the encyclopedia), but the question arising from the GFDL vs. CC-BY, etc. is what limitations may be appropriate on the additional uses that people might have for that content. Personally, I am glad that Wikipedia is subject to strong copyleft, which serves to ensure that we should also benefit from future works that build upon Wikipedia.
-Robert Rohde
But fewer future works will build of Wikipedia if they cant use it how they want. I find it interesting that the people here are concerned about financial rathe than intellectual credit.
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
As Wikipedians, I think we are all committed to giving away the content (i.e. no fees for reading the encyclopedia), but the question arising from the GFDL vs. CC-BY, etc. is what limitations may be appropriate on the additional uses that people might have for that content. Personally, I am glad that Wikipedia is subject to strong copyleft, which serves to ensure that we should also benefit from future works that build upon Wikipedia.
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On Saturday 02 August 2008 05:41:35 David Goodman wrote:
But fewer future works will build of Wikipedia if they cant use it how they want. I find it interesting that the people here are concerned about financial rathe than intellectual credit.
Both things you say are flat out wrong. First, it is by no means certain that fewer future works will build on Wikipedia if it continues with a copyleft license; immediately perhaps, but you are forgetting that people will be able to build upon derivatives of derivatives, which would otherwise not be the case. Second, I don't think that anyone here has mentioned anything about financial credit; people are concerned about continuing availability of work, which is a completely different matter.
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
As Wikipedians, I think we are all committed to giving away the content (i.e. no fees for reading the encyclopedia), but the question arising from the GFDL vs. CC-BY, etc. is what limitations may be appropriate on the additional uses that people might have for that content. Personally, I am glad that Wikipedia is subject to strong copyleft, which serves to ensure that we should also benefit from future works that build upon Wikipedia.
On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 6:23 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
On Saturday 02 August 2008 05:41:35 David Goodman wrote:
But fewer future works will build of Wikipedia if they cant use it how they want. I find it interesting that the people here are concerned about financial rathe than intellectual credit.
Both things you say are flat out wrong. First, it is by no means certain that fewer future works will build on Wikipedia if it continues with a copyleft license; immediately perhaps, but you are forgetting that people will be able to build upon derivatives of derivatives, which would otherwise not be the case.
This line of argument is more interesting in theory than in practice.
True - if we -BY license something and it gets derived / transformed into a non-free license form, we can't directly build on that.
But we can look at that, and rewrite our stuff with theirs in mind.
Not being able to simply scoop up and reuse their words is, for nonfiction writing, not much of an obstacle. If they add facts, sources, etc., those things are all openly available *anyways*. If they polish prose, we may not be able to import it wholesale, but at the least we can take it as another view on how to improve the existing WP text.
Second, I don't think that anyone here has mentioned anything about financial credit; people are concerned about continuing availability of work, which is a completely different matter.
Someone explicitly mentioned not wanting a third party to benefit financially from their Wikipedia work earlier in thread.
You and many others (myself included) may not care about this, but it is a concern that is expressed by a consistent fraction of the contributors who comment on such things.
On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 7:49 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.comwrote:
On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 6:23 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
On Saturday 02 August 2008 05:41:35 David Goodman wrote:
But fewer future works will build of Wikipedia if they cant use it how they want. I find it interesting that the people here are concerned about financial rathe than intellectual credit.
Both things you say are flat out wrong. First, it is by no means certain
that
fewer future works will build on Wikipedia if it continues with a
copyleft
license; immediately perhaps, but you are forgetting that people will be
able
to build upon derivatives of derivatives, which would otherwise not be
the
case.
This line of argument is more interesting in theory than in practice.
In practice, has it ever been done? Has any article in any one of the Wikimedia projects ever been improved by someone outside the project and then had the improvements added back without getting special permission?
I suppose this will be more likely to happen when (if) the projects move from GFDL to CC-BY-SA. But still, I wonder how big of a deal this is going to be.
On the other hand, at least in terms of images, I believe there have been cases of photographers who made money off their GFDL works, which likely would not have happened under a non-copyleft license.
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Using "free" content as a marketing tool or as a means to drive other sources of revenue (e.g. web ads), is certainly a legitimate publishing tool and one that is commonly used. However, I think if you ask Jim Baen Books about whether you can republish their books without paying royalties, then they will flatly deny such a request.
Sure, and the licenses on their "Free Library" generally are "all rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work" (despite which, it's zero cost to download straight off the web in numerous formats including RTF and all the book readers).
This is the no-cost free versus the fully open content free, in that regard. However...
Copyleft works generally are more "free" to the public than the "free" books and music people give away. In other words the public can not only enjoy them, but also build upon them.
I suspect that most of the authors you cite as benefitting from giving away free works nonetheless have an expectation that "free" means less than the concept of radical freedom that started this diversionary thread.
Cory Doctrow has put a number of his writings into the public domain. There's not much more free than that.
He's not the only one.
As Wikipedians, I think we are all committed to giving away the content (i.e. no fees for reading the encyclopedia), but the question arising from the GFDL vs. CC-BY, etc. is what limitations may be appropriate on the additional uses that people might have for that content. Personally, I am glad that Wikipedia is subject to strong copyleft, which serves to ensure that we should also benefit from future works that build upon Wikipedia.
This is a case where benefiting from future works that might build on Wikipedia is done in a manner guaranteed to reduce the chance that they're actually built that way - it's so hard, for example, to include more than "fair use" worth of a Wikipedia article in a copyrighted non-libre licensed book that we see very few requests to do so.
The reason that I -BY crosslicense my contributions is that I would like to maximize the chances that someone can find a way to reuse them. I would rather that they be reused, even if I see no cent of it and they're not republished in a fully open redistribution manner, than not reused at all.
If nobody reuses it, then the potential benefits were all lost.
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 10:01 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I know the following is not the current situation, but:
The only thing we have any real reason to insist on for Wikipedia content is attribution, and the only attribution that should be necessary is attribution to Wikipedia with a link to where exactly it was taken.
Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it. People do this with PD US government material routinely.)
I seriously doubt any contributor of Wikipedia text content really cares about individual attribution to his individual contribution. How could they, given that we permit any modification whatever, and the contribution will in most cases be entangled hopeless in hundreds of others. When you read the disclaimer, you know that you are leaving it open to be twisted in any manner whatsoever and used for purposes completely alien to yours. Sometimes I care that people preserve the attribution to me personally of something I write--in those cases I write for a more convention medium--and will usually ask not just BY, but NC. Most people care about those two concepts--they write for reputation, and if there's any money, they want some of it. But not when they write for Wikipedia. There's no money, and your contribution will be to the encyclopedia as a whole. Yes, some people say that they wrote certain articles, but the most they can really say is that they started them or wrote some of what remains in the content. You get no reputation from writing scattered sentences.
Illustrations I am told may be different. sounds reasonable--they carry individual licensing statements--though again I am puzzled, because they are open to any editing whatever. If a photographer contributes his art, he lets us distort it. The version he contributed, though, is still there.
There is a real point in advocating copyleft to change the world to the use of free content; I fully understand the desire to change the world to the merits of "libre" publishing. But maintaining it in Wikipedia is pointy--wp is there as an encyclopedia to be used, and the very thought that one could not take text and put it wherever you please is completely opposite to the spirit of contribution. Its the zealots and their legal ingenuity triumphing over commonsense and the need to actually provide a free encyclopedia in the way ordinary people mean "free". They're using the technicalities of their licenses to restrict content if other people want to use differently from the way they had in mind when they thought about how to develop non-commercial software. A brilliant innovation--but it should not apply to us.
NYBrad show the right way a good lawyer approaches things: decide what we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it. I'm not one, but I think the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what i expect, i hereby offer to do it.
On 7/31/08, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is giving such limited license choices. I don't know for sure, of course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike licenses would have on embedded ads.
Unless they're worried about reusers having embedded ads, I don't see a problem - Google require you to grant them a pretty wide ranging license in addition to whatever you give the public.
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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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I think, however, that the distinction is more than artificial. When I write code, for example, I license it under GPL, not BSD. My choice in this matter is deliberate-I don't want my code used in closed source software. I expect that anyone who takes advantage of my offer to share my code will in turn share theirs. The GPL enforces this, other licenses may not, so I pick it for that exact reason. It is not, to me, a triviality or a technicality.
On the other hand, I -personally- agree with you about free knowledge, and so I personally choose to license my contributions to Wikipedia as public domain (and have an explicit statement on my user page of my intent to do so). However, other contributors who contribute to articles may have a very real expectation that their contributions are under the GFDL, and that the viral share-alike requirements of the GFDL will be followed by reusers. I imagine that to at least a significant portion of these contributors, the GFDL requirements are similarly not artificial or technicalities, they are core expectations that these people had when they chose to contribute to Wikipedia. "I'm happy to share my knowledge with you, but if you reuse my work, I expect you to similarly share what you made with it, and to make sure that any reuses from there are also shared" is the exact expectation of the GFDL. That expectation of those who contributed in good faith under it should not be dismissed as light or trivial, and it certainly should not be denigrated as anti-free when it is the exact opposite.
Hoi, It is good to remember what Wikipedia aims to do. It aims to create an encyclopaedic resource. It is good to remember what the Wikimedia Foundation is there for. It ams to bring good information to all people in this world.
When Wikipedia started, the GFDL was selected. It has been plain for a long time that this specific license is not the best for Wikipedia and the WMF. This license was created to license the documentation that is created for software. There is clarity in many circles that the CC-by-sa is a better mouse trap for the knowledge that can be found in Wikipedia. This license shares the same key characteristics with the GFDL including its viral nature.
Technically it is possible to use the CC-by material that is created in Knol in Wikipedia. Mike Godwin is apprehensive of doing exactly this because in the analogous BSD - GPL world many hard words have been used because of the lack of cooperation coming from GPL programmers when they incorporated BSD software in the further development of the original BSD software.
From my perspective, of the three licenses that Knol allows, only the CC-by
is a license I have affinity with. I am sure that the average Wikimedian does not think highly of CC-by-nd or an all reserved copyright statement. Consequently, the only Knols that might be of interest to us are the once with a more permissive license that our own. We can make use of their content, but I do not think that it is likely to happen that much.
As it has been said often enough, our license is not compatible with the license allowed by Google for the Knols. Consequently it is for the authors of articles that end up as a Knol to indicate that this is not allowed.
Those people who care too much about all the fine points of licenses will continue to make their finer points. In the mean time, I am happy that there is another initiative that tries to inform people. Thanks, GeardM
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 10:01 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I know the following is not the current situation, but:
The only thing we have any real reason to insist on for Wikipedia content is attribution, and the only attribution that should be necessary is attribution to Wikipedia with a link to where exactly it was taken.
Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it. People do this with PD US government material routinely.)
I seriously doubt any contributor of Wikipedia text content really cares about individual attribution to his individual contribution. How could they, given that we permit any modification whatever, and the contribution will in most cases be entangled hopeless in hundreds of others. When you read the disclaimer, you know that you are leaving it open to be twisted in any manner whatsoever and used for purposes completely alien to yours. Sometimes I care that people preserve the attribution to me personally of something I write--in those cases I write for a more convention medium--and will usually ask not just BY, but NC. Most people care about those two concepts--they write for reputation, and if there's any money, they want some of it. But not when they write for Wikipedia. There's no money, and your contribution will be to the encyclopedia as a whole. Yes, some people say that they wrote certain articles, but the most they can really say is that they started them or wrote some of what remains in the content. You get no reputation from writing scattered sentences.
Illustrations I am told may be different. sounds reasonable--they carry individual licensing statements--though again I am puzzled, because they are open to any editing whatever. If a photographer contributes his art, he lets us distort it. The version he contributed, though, is still there.
There is a real point in advocating copyleft to change the world to the use of free content; I fully understand the desire to change the world to the merits of "libre" publishing. But maintaining it in Wikipedia is pointy--wp is there as an encyclopedia to be used, and the very thought that one could not take text and put it wherever you please is completely opposite to the spirit of contribution. Its the zealots and their legal ingenuity triumphing over commonsense and the need to actually provide a free encyclopedia in the way ordinary people mean "free". They're using the technicalities of their licenses to restrict content if other people want to use differently from the way they had in mind when they thought about how to develop non-commercial software. A brilliant innovation--but it should not apply to us.
NYBrad show the right way a good lawyer approaches things: decide what we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it. I'm not one, but I think the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what i expect, i hereby offer to do it.
On 7/31/08, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is giving such limited license choices. I don't know for sure, of course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike licenses would have on embedded ads.
Unless they're worried about reusers having embedded ads, I don't see a problem - Google require you to grant them a pretty wide ranging license in addition to whatever you give the public.
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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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I think, however, that the distinction is more than artificial. When I write code, for example, I license it under GPL, not BSD. My choice in this matter is deliberate-I don't want my code used in closed source software. I expect that anyone who takes advantage of my offer to share my code will in turn share theirs. The GPL enforces this, other licenses may not, so I pick it for that exact reason. It is not, to me, a triviality or a technicality.
On the other hand, I -personally- agree with you about free knowledge, and so I personally choose to license my contributions to Wikipedia as public domain (and have an explicit statement on my user page of my intent to do so). However, other contributors who contribute to articles may have a very real expectation that their contributions are under the GFDL, and that the viral share-alike requirements of the GFDL will be followed by reusers. I imagine that to at least a significant portion of these contributors, the GFDL requirements are similarly not artificial or technicalities, they are core expectations that these people had when they chose to contribute to Wikipedia. "I'm happy to share my knowledge with you, but if you reuse my work, I expect you to similarly share what you made with it, and to make sure that any reuses from there are also shared" is the exact expectation of the GFDL. That expectation of those who contributed in good faith under it should not be dismissed as light or trivial, and it certainly should not be denigrated as anti-free when it is the exact opposite.
-- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
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On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:39 PM, Mike Godwin mgodwin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Massimiliano writes:
How could you add SA, for example, without being the original licensor, for importing to Wikipedia? How could you subtract it without being the original licensor(s), for importing to Knol?
As long as you put the author's credits, respecting in this way the request of attribution, you can change the license for your derivative works and this includes also adding a SA clause. At least this is what I have ever believed.
Sure, a sufficiently transformative derivative work might give you the ability to create a new license with strong copyleft. But that's not what we've been seeing on Knol or what we've been discussing here, it seems to me. Instead, we've been talking about importing and exporting whole articles.
Still, what legal problems could possibly be created by copying a CC-BY article from Knol to Wikipedia and then not making any changes, as long as you maintain the attribution? Presumably, the whole point of importing it would be to improve it, and the "sufficiently transformative" bar is incredibly low, but even if you don't create a derivative, what's the problem?
2008/8/1 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
Still, what legal problems could possibly be created by copying a CC-BY article from Knol to Wikipedia and then not making any changes, as long as you maintain the attribution? Presumably, the whole point of importing it would be to improve it, and the "sufficiently transformative" bar is incredibly low, but even if you don't create a derivative, what's the problem?
Outside of the legal technicalities (IE sticking to thing I think were intended) the requirement to include a copy of the URL of the license (or the actual license) is a pain.
Moveing onto the legal technicalities
the "You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License..." is a problem since the notice that refers to the license is part of the interface and is probably copyright google and thus non free.
There is also the fairly standard "keep intact all copyright notices" invariant section bit which is allowed under the GFDL but we generally prefer to delete content rather than deal with copyright notices.
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