--- On Tue, 10/26/10, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikisource-l] Copyright status of scans
To: "discussion list for Wikisource, the free library" <wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Tuesday, October 26, 2010, 8:07 AM
2010/10/26 Klaus Graf <klausgraf(a)googlemail.com>
Roma locuta causa finita.
I actually wrote this mail for understanding the issue,
It is a difficult issue to understand. Because most people think they basically understand copyright and there is this little question that they have which does not fit. But often why the question doesn't fit is because the person misunderstands copyright in general.
Copyright does not offer clear answers. No one except for silly non-profit projects want to really know whether a work is free of copyright protection for it own sake. All the rest of the world wants to know either A) Can I get away with using this work? or B) Can get some money from other people who are using that work? And those questions are usually answer by settlement while the copyright status of the work is left undefined. If you ask a copyright lawyer if a work is free of copyright protection he will tell
you "I would make a case for your use of the work along the lines of these three separate arguments" And if you tell him, "No I don't want to know the best defenses for my use of the work. I want to know the true status of the work" Then he will blink at you in confusion. *No one* is trained on how to define a lack of copyright protection as if it were an inherent property of a work.
Assuming you misunderstand copyright, because frankly it is the most likely case, here is a short primer:
If you own a piece of property, it is a physical thing which can either exist or be destroyed. If this property is sold to someone else then you no longer have access to it. And no one else may have access to it so long as you do not sell it.
If you own a piece of intellectual property, it is an immaterial thing that will can continue to exist even after it is destroyed. Also it may
be transformed again and again into derivatives while the original form still exists. Intellectual property is sold by making copies of the original so that many people may have access to it without owning it. Also it is possible that someone may own a piece of intellectual property and not have access to it!
Ownership and access are separate entities in intellectual property.
Copyright only applies to very specific things. It only protects the expression, not the underlying idea expressed. It must be a creative expression, you cannot own the copyright to the population tables of Italian cities. It must be a fixed expression, you cannot own the copyright to your conversation on the train. If a work contains a mixture of creative and non-creative parts, only the creative parts are copyrighted even though copyright is only tracked by entire works. So a book on the cities of Italy which includes population table in the
appendix will simply be listed as copyrighted even though the protection does not apply to the population tables.
Your specific question was about scans of books which are out of copyright. That issue is mostly one of creativity and of access. If I wrote out a copy of the Count of Monte Cristo in longhand, I would be expend a great deal of mechanical effort but not creative effort. My work in long hand would not be considered a "derivative work" nor grant me copyright protection. I would however own a longhand copy of the Count of Monte Cristo that I could sell or otherwise treat as a piece of physical property. If I translated the Count of Monte Cristo into English, I would expend creative effort in choosing which exact words to use and which meanings to emphasize. My English version of the Count of Monte Cristo would be considered a derivative work and my creative contributions and only my creative contributions would be protected by a new copyright. If someone who had read only my translation of the Count of Monte Cristo, wrote a plot summary in under
one hundred words they would not be infringing on my copyright. Because the underlying story was not a part of my creative contribution to the work. Now a scan of an out-of-copyright version of the Count of Monte Cristo is a purely a mechanical effort and is comparable to my longhand version of the work. When someone makes a scan, they have no creative contribution which could be protected by copyright, but they do own the resulting file. And they may grant you access to this file or not. They may grant you access to the file only under certain conditions. This would be considered a contract and is commonly referred to a "terms of use". Often you are considered to have agreed to the terms of use, and therefore bound by contract, merely by your decision to click and access the file. In these cases the terms of use are often written to mirror the sorts of protections that copyright law would grant if it where applicable. The main difference is
copyright law is attaches restrictions to a work wherever it goes and whoever comes across. Contract law attaches restrictions to you as a consenting party to the contract, and the restrictions end with you. If you save a copy of the file containing the scan of Monte Cristo on a flash drive for your personal reading as allowed in the terms of use, and you leave your flash drive behind on the train. Whoever picks up your flash drive and opens the file is not bound by any contract that you were party to. They may use the file however they wish.
Much of the confusion over the issue of scans is due to conflating contractual terms of use with copyright protections. These are different areas of the law which use very different approaches to create similar restrictions. This explanation is rather simplified, but it should help you understand the questions a little better.
Birgitte SB
Dear Wikisource community,
I want to a ask a question that surely have been raised before.
Unfortunately, I haven't find that in the archive of wikisource-l,
so I will ask you.
On what legal basis are we uploading Google Books (and Internet Archive, and
Gallica) scans on Commons, putting the {{PD-Scan}} on those?
I remember endless discussions in it.source about these issues, with
contrasting opinions (both with reasons).
For example, if we are able to upload from Gallica to Commons and then
Wikisource, why the WM-Fr community
did have to make an agreement with the BnF? Am I understanding this
correctly? Was the material *donated*?
I know the texts are PD, but also the images?
I know this is a probably well known topic, I've just never read a
definitive clarification on this issue.
Thank you
Aubrey
Sorry to all,
I forgot to change the header of the message and Alex replied to all
and not to me only.
My bad, please ignore.
I'm resending the original message below.
Aubrey
----
Being the problem of metadata a long pain which is bothering wikimedia
projects from beginning, and Wikisource is no exception.
If we want to be a reliable digital library, we should face the fact that
our information about books are not using standards (e.g Dublin Core) nor
are machine-readable. MediaWiki still doesn't have a proper extension for
handling metadata, and SemanticMediaWiki is not used for some reasons I
understand only partially (security and scalability issues, as far as I
know).
Thus, what I'm gonna present you is just a proposal, made by Alex Brollo, in
the quick-and-dirty DIY style that we see often in wikis.
As all of you know, Wikisource uses the (beloved) #lst extension, usually
used only into the proofread procedure.
In It.source, we are exploring into it.source some other possibile uses of
#lst extension, the main one is to create something like "variables", that
can be used everywhere into our site. In a nut-shell, it's a DIY
"semantization" of text.
Simply, if you put the code <section begin="birth date" />May 6,
1876<section end="birth date" /> into a "Author:Pinco Pallino", you can
obviuosly access to birth date of the imaginary author Pinco Pallino with
#lst:
{{#section:Author:Pinco Pallino|birth date}}
that is pretty intuitive.
(it should work also with the brand-new syntax ## ##)
Using this "emerging feature" we are converting all the parameters of main,
standard templates into "DIY variables" by bot, with very interesting,
unexpected results.
You obviously need to put the "extracted data" somewhere: in it.source we
decided to test as a data container both Talk pages (nsPage:) and main page
itself, with a Javascript system for hiding the code to users
(but it's there). Of course, if things go ahed we could even request a Data:
namespace...
Currently, we are using this feature to show in with a single template the
year and the status of a single text or page. For examples,
see http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Pagina_principale/Sezioni#Ultimi_arrivi.
Or to show the page status in the transcluded version:
http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Storia_di_una_capinera/II
At the end of the day, we have a system to "extract data" e do whatever we
want with them. If we had proper templates following Dublin Core (and maybe
a form Upload-like to put the data inside), we could even solve the bulk of
our metadata issue. In Paris, in the GLAM conference, we'll probably discuss
a lot about these
(definitely, I will).
So we want to ask you if there are any other similar experience, and which
drawbacks do you see.
We are aware that the system is heavy, it's not the way to fix this kind of
problem,
and stuff like that. If you can amend it, or suggest better
practices/procedure, you are definetely welcome.
For once, it would be very good to coordinate/collaborate together in
developing an important tool as this seem to be.
Cheers,
Aubrey
WMI Board
Being the problem of metadata a long pain which is bothering wikimedia
projects from beginning, and Wikisource is no exception.
If we want to be a reliable digital library, we should face the fact that
our information about books are not using standards (e.g Dublin Core) nor
are machine-readable. MediaWiki still doesn't have a proper extension for
handling metadata, and SemanticMediaWiki is not used for some reasons I
understand only partially (security and scalability issues, as far as I
know).
Thus, what I'm gonna present you is just a proposal, made by Alex Brollo, in
the quick-and-dirty DIY style that we see often in wikis.
As all of you know, Wikisource uses the (beloved) #lst extension, usually
used only into the proofread procedure.
In It.source, we are exploring into it.source some other possibile uses of
#lst extension, the main one is to create something like "variables", that
can be used everywhere into our site. In a nut-shell, it's a DIY
"semantization" of text.
Simply, if you put the code <section begin="birth date" />May 6,
1876<section end="birth date" /> into a "Author:Pinco Pallino", you can
obviuosly access to birth date of the imaginary author Pinco Pallino with
#lst:
{{#section:Author:Pinco Pallino|birth date}}
that is pretty intuitive.
(it should work also with the brand-new syntax ## ##)
Using this "emerging feature" we are converting all the parameters of main,
standard templates into "DIY variables" by bot, with very interesting,
unexpected results.
You obviously need to put the "extracted data" somewhere: in it.source we
decided for Talk pages, with a Javascript system for hiding the code to
users
(but it's there). Of course, if things go ahed we could even request a Data:
namespace...
Currently, we are using this feature to show in with a single template the
year and the status of a single text or page. For examples,
see http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Pagina_principale/Sezioni#Ultimi_arrivi.
Or to show the page status in the transcluded version:
http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Storia_di_una_capinera/II
At the end of the day, we have a system to "extract data" e do whatever we
want with them. If we had proper templates following Dublin Core (and maybe
a form Upload-like to put the data inside), we could even solve the bulk of
our metadata issue. In Paris, in the GLAM conference, we'll probably discuss
a lot about these
(definitely, I will).
So we want to ask you if there are any other similar experience, and which
drawbacks do you see.
We are aware that the system is heavy, it's not the way to fix this kind of
problem,
and stuff like that. If you can amend it, or suggest better
practices/procedure, you are definetely welcome.
For once, it would be very good to coordinate/collaborate together in
developing an important tool as this seem to be.
Cheers,
Aubrey
WMI Board
Dear Wikilibrarians,
I'm looking for good presentations/slides on Wikimedia sister-projects:
does anyone have one about Wikisource?
I wrote some slides few years ago, but they are pretty outdated and I would
like to know
how the other chapters presented it..
I have looked pretty much everywhere on mets/commons pages,
but everything is on Wikipedia, there's nothing specific on our project.
Thank you for you help.
Aubrey
WM Italy Board
We use in it.source (and the idea has been exported into some other
projects) a template, who builds a user defined, invisible anchor and
"marks" some text near the anchor; the marked text will be highlighed (with
a coloured background) only when the anchor is the target of a link (coming
from everywhere: the same project, a wiki project, or an external link).
The template is [[:it:s:Template:§]], and it has been recently intoduced
into en.source as [[:en:s:Template:Anchor2]].
Here an example pointing to Divina Commedia:
http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Divina_Commedia/Inferno/Canto_I#Ed_ecco
Consider that:
# presently you'll see the highlighting with Firefox only;
# the following additional row of code has to be added into your own
common.css and vector.css, of should be added to Common.css by a sysop:
*span.Citazione:target {background-color:#DEF;}
*where "Citazione" is the name of the class used into the template:
<span id="{{{1}}}" title="Ancora:{{{1}}}" class="Citazione">{{
#ifeq:{{{2|}}}
||
|{{{2}}}</span>
}}
It would be great if source project could add that row of css into their
Common.css, allowing external users to see the highlighting feature where a
template §, or similar ones, has been seeded.
Alex
Several texts on Russian Wikisource are being considered for deletion
based on Russian law.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2010/10/19
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Russian police probe Wikipedia for extremism
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
2010/10/19 Виктория <mstislavl1(a)gmail.com>:
> Stanislav Kozlovskiy is a vice-president of Wikimedia Russia.
>>
>> It is still not clear whether this is hoax or somebody really filed a
>> lawsuit.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Yaroslav
>>
>>
> As I understand it he didn't file the lawsuit, he just complained to the
> police. The police was obliged to tick the box contacting somebody but they
> don't take it too seriously. The files in question - а translation of
> Mussolini book and a leaglet about Beslan were already removed from the
> Russian Wikisource.
They are not deleted yet.
Doctrine of Fascism
http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0…
letter to US President about Beslan terrorist attack
http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BC,_%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%BE_…!
And there is still a lot of discussion on the Russian Wikisource village pump.
http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Викитека:Форум
They have created a template to put on works that are on the Russian
Federal List of Extremist Materials.
http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:%D0%A4%D…
The list of forbidden works is also available on Russian Wikisource.
http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1…
(We should translate that list onto English Wikisource..)
--
John Vandenberg
Please take a look here:
http://toolserver.org/~thomasv/graphs/Wikisource_-_texts_it.png
We are happy to let you know that, thanks to Match and Split tool by
ThomasV, installed just some days ago, there's a very small, but mostly
interesting, change into the graph: as you can see, naked texts are, for the
first time, decreasing, while texts with scan are increasing. The difference
seems so small ... but it's IMHO highly significant and encouraging (and...
there is a really hard work under such a small graph difference!)
Thanks ThomasV, and thanks Candalua, who successfully installed the tool
into it.source!
Alex
I suppose this may interest you.
Sorry for crossposting; please join the discussion on foundation-l, if
you wish.
Nemo
-------- Messaggio Originale --------
Oggetto: Five-year WMF targets exclude non-Wikipedia projects
Data: Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:33:07 +0200
Da: Federico Leva (Nemo)
A: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Despite repeated assurances at Wikimania, on lists and on strategywiki,
that the strategic plan was going to consider all Wikimedia projects as
important, now at
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Five-year_targets the
second target, «Increase the amount of information we offer» considers
only the number of Wikipedia articles.
«We're aware of the challenges around bot-created articles, articles of
low quality, etc., and the limited focus on Wikipedia, so this metric
shouldn't be seen in isolation, but is an important indicator.» Yes, but
a wrong one.
I'm, very, very disappointed: I have to conclude that all the words on
community participation etc. were only empty rhetoric.
Nemo
