[Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l> to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.]
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Eclecticology wrote:
How others use the material is their problem, and their risk. We shouldn't have to baby-sit them. Whatever license or copyrights are applied to Wikipedia reflects a collective comfort level. The user is still responsible for his own due-dilligence, no matter how conservative we are on the matter.
They're not "others", lot of "them" are Wikipedians. If everyone had to consult a lawyer before distributing free software, it wouldn't be half as successful as it is now.
This isn't entirely true; the more paranoid must still check the less paranoid. But Wikipedia needs to make it easy by separating out the "fair use" pics and not claiming any longer that they are being distributed under the GFDL.
As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now (hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain). I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon! Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?
-- Toby
On Monday 02 June 2003 02:33, Toby Bartels wrote:
[Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l> to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.]
thanks.
This isn't entirely true; the more paranoid must still check the less paranoid. But Wikipedia needs to make it easy by separating out the "fair use" pics and not claiming any longer that they are being distributed under the GFDL.
or we stay GFDL (as the FAQ says) and link the "fair use" pics which contradict the spirit of the GFDL externally. I would love to see the core of Wikipedia staying free in the sense that you can say to everyone, take the whole article (text+pics) and do with it whatever you want.
As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now (hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain). I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon! Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?
The problem is that the GFDL main purpose was for technical documentation. This license was never invented for an encyclopedia-like project.
Perhaps we can use the "invariant section" from the GFDL in order to ensure that quotations are not modified. IMHO this would be sufficent to make quotes compatible with GFDL.
best regards, Marco
Marco Krohn wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
[Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l> to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.]
thanks.
The Reply-To: header is my friend! ^_^
But Wikipedia needs to make it easy by separating out the "fair use" pics and not claiming any longer that they are being distributed under the GFDL.
or we stay GFDL (as the FAQ says) and link the "fair use" pics which contradict the spirit of the GFDL externally. I would love to see the core of Wikipedia staying free in the sense that you can say to everyone, take the whole article (text+pics) and do with it whatever you want.
It probably would be simplest to link the "fair use" images externally, just to make things clearer to the end user. Otherwise we'd have to say (at the bottom of the page) "[...] except for any images that may be contained in this page, whose copyright status is given on their image description pages". OTOH, if we *don't* start linking these things externally, then we'd better start writing that!
As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now (hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain). I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon! Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?
The problem is that the GFDL main purpose was for technical documentation. This license was never invented for an encyclopedia-like project.
Right, so it's starting to bite us by being applied inappropriately. It was all that Jimbo had available at the start, and it's incompatible with being moved over to another licence. Ultimately, using the GNU licences removes one from the nonsense of ordinary copyright law to whatever the FSF says. Someday that will be nonsense too.
Perhaps we can use the "invariant section" from the GFDL in order to ensure that quotations are not modified. IMHO this would be sufficent to make quotes compatible with GFDL.
I don't see how this helps, or would be desirable.
The potential GFDL violation, IIUC, is that somebody could remove all of our text and gather just quotations together, publishing these as "The Quotations of Chairman Mao" (or whoever it was that they gathered the quotations of). Since this would on longer be fair use, they can't modify our pages freely, even though they haven't violated your invariant section suggestion.
OTOH, one is certainly free to modify an individual quotation within one of our pages, say by eliding ("...") an irrelevant clause, adding back something relevant that was originally elided, or removing the quotation altogether as unnecessary for the page. None of this would be allowed if the quotation were an invariant section.
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now (hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain). I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon! Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?
Yep. Copyright (and some other intellectual property law) is already close to impossible to maintain. With so many people on line the medium has indeed become the message. The greedheads (in Lord Buckley's terms) have screwed the golden calf in the ass. :-) I'm not surprised.
Ec
Hi all, No one answer my last mail :o( I have many picture I want to upload to Wikipedia and I want to know if I must/can add a copyright notice on the picture (bottom-right corner : "Under GFDL") ? Please answer me.
Aoineko
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
Hi all, No one answer my last mail :o( I have many picture I want to upload to Wikipedia and I want to know if I must/can add a copyright notice on the picture (bottom-right corner : "Under GFDL") ? Please answer me.
Aoineko
If you need to have the copyright information, it's probably better to do it in the image's comments area (JPEG supports it, I'm not sure about PNG). For Wikipedia, the preferred form is to add the information to the image's page.
Hi all, No one answer my last mail :o( I have many picture I want to upload to Wikipedia and I want to know if I must/can add a copyright notice on the picture (bottom-right corner :
"Under
GFDL") ? Please answer me.
Aoineko
If you need to have the copyright information, it's probably better to do it in the image's comments area (JPEG supports it, I'm not sure about PNG). For Wikipedia, the preferred form is to add the information to the image's page.
Ok, thank you very much. Comment area is a good policy because image's page isn't attached to the image. I didn't found way to edit the comment area... I will search more.
Aoineko
--- Guillaume Blanchard gblanchard@arcsy.co.jp wrote:
Hi all, No one answer my last mail :o( I have many picture I want to upload to Wikipedia and I want to know if I must/can add a copyright notice on the picture (bottom-right corner : "Under GFDL") ? Please answer me.
Aoineko
I would highly prefer that you limit the cp notice on the comment, not embedded in the picture as done on some egyptian pictures. I think it is rather ruining the pict to embedded text in them. As someone heavily relying on pict made available on the net, I don't use them "defaced" by textual add-ons. Of course, that is a totally aside-legal opinion :-)
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(Guillaume Blanchard gblanchard@arcsy.co.jp): Hi all, No one answer my last mail :o( I have many picture I want to upload to Wikipedia and I want to know if I must/can add a copyright notice on the picture (bottom-right corner : "Under GFDL") ? Please answer me.
I would certainly prefer that no text of any kind be added to the picture itself, but rather placed in the description page (and embedded into the JPG/PNG file as a comment as well if desired). Let's not clutter the visual with unnecessary distractions; just make it clear who created the picture and what its status is using the non-visual means provided for that.
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