Hi,

On 3/29/07, Pedro Sanchez pdsanchez@gmail.com wrote:

About the board resolution and wikiquote.

It says that now projects can't hold nonfree content unless they develop an exemption policy.

I agree.

Wikiquotes host mostly content under some sort of exemption (for instance, when quoting from TV series). Is the resolution meaning that all wikiquotes have to develop a specific EDP for TEXT ?

As long as the language project would like to host such copyrighted materials, I think so. Since those materials are mostly not released under free license but introduced into the project as fairuse or other legal excemption. On English Wikipedia Village pump, JeffQ pointed out we would need a sort of [[WQ:EDP]]. Personally I support this idea.

As far as I know, some Wikiquotes like Japanese don't follow the course and accept only free/PD materials, for your information. Under the Japanese jurisdiction, there is no fairuse but "fair quotation" - it allows you only you need the cited materials as a secondary part of your whole creation: it means a set of quotes of a living poet on her Wikipedia article will be okay, but an Wikiquote article which has only quotes is not okay. For such projects, there is no room for WQ:EDP unless they declair to follow only US law, but it wouldn't be a wise way (people living in Japan who may be the majority of website visitors will take a legal risk in reuse). .

Pedro Sanchez wrote:

About the board resolution and wikiquote.

It says that now projects can't hold nonfree content unless they develop an exemption policy.

Wikiquotes host mostly content under some sort of exemption (for instance, when quoting from TV series). Is the resolution meaning that all wikiquotes have to develop a specific EDP for TEXT ?

As far as I understand it, yes. And it's a good thing, in my opinion.

Quotations laws do not follow any international conventions - they are exceptions to the international conventions on copyright, actually. Thus, the local laws may have significant differences. Aphaia just posted an interesting example about Japan. The French copyright law allows short quotes, but has some interesting restrictions : the quotes must have a source and has to be exact. There is also many documentation on the maximum length of quotes (you have to take into account the size of the source quoted *and* the size of the article where the quote is).

We should really try to seek compliance to our local laws whenever possible. That's not always possible, though : there are probably incompatible clauses in the French, Belgian, Swiss, Canadian and Algerian laws (but they're all french-speaking countries, so fr: is concerned with all of them).

As for fr:wq : we already have a sort of EDP, which is our « charte »[0]. It states that the applicable law is US law, that quotes must be added according to quotation rights and database rights, and, most importantly, that all quotes must have a precise source (e.g. for books : title, author, publisher, year and page number).

The main purpose of this EDP is to prevent people from taking quotes in existing quote databases and adding them to Wikiquote - which is why the French Wikiquote had to be closed and erased last year. But IMO unsourced quotes (and quotes with vague sources) can cause many legal problems: defamation, integrity of work and all sort of [[w:moral rights]]. These should probably be considered for an EDP, as most countries (including the US) are signatory to the Berne convention (which includes moral rights).

Just my 2¢,

[0]: http://fr.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Charte (in French only...)