Hi,
On behalf of the Wikisource contributors, I request an official advice
from the Wikimedia Foundation regarding copyright issues on Wikisource.
The issue is whether works which are public domain in USA, but not in
their country of origin can be published on Wikisource. Public domain in
USA is the rule which is applied since the beginning of the project in
November 2004. I ask in December 2004 [1] that a clear policy should be
defined, but it was never done. Subdomains have followed different rules
on this matter: for example, the English Wikisource publishes works from
George Bernard Shaw [2], an Irish author, works which are public domain
in USA but not in Ireland. A similar issue now arises on the French
Wikisource [3] about works from Gaston Leroux.
So can we follow a uniform policy accross languages and subdomains and
publish any work which is public domain in USA, or should another policy
be defined?
Thanks for your help,
Best regards,
Yann Forget
[1] http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource_talk:Copyright_policy
[2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:George_Bernard_Shaw
[3]http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Pages_soupçonnées_de_copyright#G…
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http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres
Dear Yann Forget,
Thank you for your mail.
Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On behalf of the Wikisource contributors, I request an official advice
> from the Wikimedia Foundation regarding copyright issues on Wikisource.
>
> The issue is whether works which are public domain in USA, but not in
> their country of origin can be published on Wikisource. Public domain in
> USA is the rule which is applied since the beginning of the project in
> November 2004. I ask in December 2004 [1] that a clear policy should be
> defined, but it was never done. Subdomains have followed different rules
> on this matter: for example, the English Wikisource publishes works from
> George Bernard Shaw [2], an Irish author, works which are public domain
> in USA but not in Ireland. A similar issue now arises on the French
> Wikisource [3] about works from Gaston Leroux.
>
> So can we follow a uniform policy accross languages and subdomains and
> publish any work which is public domain in USA, or should another policy
> be defined?
This is not an official reply from the Foundation, but I've followed copyright
discussions for a while. Since the Wikipedia webservers are located in the
United States, US law is the minimum standard that all projects need to
follow: if something is legally unusable under US law, it should not be used
on any project or language. Individual projects and languages are free to
apply additional restrictions if they wish.
Yours sincerely,
William Fairfax
--
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org
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<http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>.
My own thoughts on this, which I also expressed on the meta page:
1. There is plenty of material out that that is already public domain. Part
of the problem is that it can take forever and a day to digitize it all. In
the case of books and magazines, digitization often involves destroying the
hard copies in the process. There are, however, specialized scanners that can do
the work without ruining the books themselves. These are expensive (about US
$30,000 a machine). Ten machines, strategically located around the world,
along with student staff to operate them around the clock could help to
preserve these texts and store them for prosperity. Additional people (paid and
volunteer) will be needed to OCR, proof, and hyperlink the material to ensure
that it doesn't get lost in a glut of material (I have visions of the final
scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark was finally stored in some crate
in an army warehouse).
2. While OCR capacities exist for some languages, they do not exist for
other languages, where the material is much more likely to get lost. Manuscripts
in Tibetan monasteries, for example, can be scanend but not OCRed easily. To
make this information available, developers should be paid to create adequate
OCR tools for these languages. Rough cost: $5 million.
3. Music has been recorded around the world for well over a century, yet
many of the early recordings are being lost, especially those on wax cylinders
and porcelain records. Preservation includes locating, identifying, and
remastering. People must be trained to do this. Rough cost: $35 million over two
years.
4. This is true of old films as well. Celluloid copies are extremely rare
and extremely flammable. Restoration is exceedingly costly. For example, [[Theda
Bara]] is a well-known vamp of early Hollywood (the word "vamp" was first
used to describe her), yet none of her films survive, and they were made less
than a hundred years ago. Films are international, they include important
historic documents such as newsreels, and they are being lost every day. Today,
most preservation work is being done by major studios, since it is so costly.
In other words, they are taking important works now in the public domain,
restoring them, and contending that the restoration is an original work, i.e.,
another hundred years at least until some Vigo or Charlie Chaplin films enter
the public domain ... and little attention is being paid to newsreels of
events like the Russian revolution, World War I, etc. Like music, people should
be offered scholarships to learn the art of film restoration and work on these
projects. Until this happens it can be outsourced. Rough cost: $50 million.
5. To ensure all of this remains accessible, we will need a LOT of servers
and bandwidth: Initial outlay: $10 million.
Total $100 million dollars, spent over 5 years. Costs include staffing,
identifying prospective targets, transportation, overhead, etc. Just coordinating
a project of this scope will take a lot of effort.
And there is competition too. As an example,
_http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/_ (http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/) is a collection of
Internation Women's Journals, some of which are very important historically.
They are already scanned, but they are inaccessible because a private
company has (rightfully or wrongfully) copyrighted the scans.
Lots to be done. You will see how quickly $100 million can be spent.
Danny
In a message dated 10/15/2006 11:27:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jwales(a)wikia.com writes:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you
like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
--Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Wikimédia France has installed a portal at www.wikitheque.fr (and had
obtained .com and .org in order to prevent squatting).
This portal provides task-oriented directions for finding images and
text content on Commons and Wikisource, with the help of Wikipedia (we
may in the future extend this to friendly third-party sites with libre
content).
Examples of tasks include: I'm looking for a photograph of an animal,
where do I look? I only know the French common name of that species,
what do I do?
The idea is to address the needs of e.g. teachers and schoolchildren
with step-by-step instructions.
This portal is now not much developed, but we aim to make it bigger.
In order to preemptively address a few obvious questions:
* This portal will not provide content; content will all be on other
sites (Commons, Wikisource etc.).
* This portal is not editable as a wiki because there would be
difficulties with that:
** The wiki interface may scare "normal" people - too many buttons.
** We cannot afford vandalism on a portal for welcoming e.g. schoolchildren.
** We might use a "closed" wiki but it's a heavier solution than the
current one.
-- DM
Forward from foundation-l
Birgitte SB
--- Anthere <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
> To: foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org
> From: Anthere <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com>
> Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:51:22 +0200
> CC: wikimediafr-l(a)wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Wikimedia
> promotion committee
>
> A little bump to mention how much this committee
> important is and to
> invite people to join it.
>
> I suggest that three focus are in particular
> important, and the three
> requires very different people help.
>
> The first is improvement of the material we can
> provide when we visit
> potential partners. There is already a good work on
> this, and the
> Foundation needs to provide further input and data
> to make it.
> Suggestions from people in business in particular is
> welcome.
>
> The second focus is about translation. The leaflets
> are already
> translated in several languages, but probably not
> enough. They need more
> translation AND MOSTLY, communities in various
> languages need to know
> these documents exist.
>
> Last is projects. We have a lot of documentation on
> Wikipedia. Very
> little on Commons, Wikisource etc... We need MORE.
>
> Incidently, the french language community has an
> urgent need for
> Wikisource and Wikicommons projects to receive a lot
> of light from
> french press.... within 2 weeks (yeah, short). We
> must be noticeable as
> a french virtual library urgently :-)
>
> Can it be a special urgent focus ?
>
> ant
>
>
> Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> > I'd like to announce here the creation of the
> Wikimedia promotion
> > committee. It is a new subcommittee of the
> Communications committee
> > which deals with the production of promotion
> material for Wikimedia and
> > its projects and establishing guidelines to ensure
> that promotion
> > material follows some quality standards.
> >
> > == Membership ==
> >
> > The subcom is currently composed of Arne Klempert
> and me. Some
> > background: Arne has worked as media designer for
> some years and he has
> > created much of the printed material for Wikimedia
> Deutschland. I'm a
> > typesetter's daughter, interested and educated in
> typography since
> > childhood and worked as a journalist for some
> years where I also got
> > some insights into professional layout.
> >
> > The procedure for becoming a member of the
> committee is simple: submit
> > good work ;-) If you have a skilled hand for
> design and like creating
> > needed promotion stuff, we're happy to welcome you
> as new member.
> >
> > Of course you don't have to be a member to create
> promotion stuff - if
> > you do on a regular basis, we're very happy to
> hear from you, review
> > work together and help.
> >
> > == Visual identity guidelines ==
> >
> > The committee works on developing visual identity
> guidelines for the
> > projects. In the absence of project specific
> guidelines, the guidelines
> > for the Wikimedia logo are valid:
> >
>
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_visual_identity_guidelines
> >
> > If you design promotion stuff for your project,
> please follow them as
> > closely as possible (or we'll come and hunt you at
> night ;-)
> >
> > == Production of promotion material ==
> >
> > It's obvious that two people can't do all the
> necessary design work for
> > all the projects in the different languages.
> Currently, we focus on
> > creating a basic set of necessary things:
> > * Brochure (threefold, DIN A4), see
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Leaflet
> > * Cheatsheet (DIN A long), see
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cheatsheet
> > * Information kit for journalists, sponsors and
> business contacts (DIN A4)
> >
> > The first steps towards an achieved corporate
> identity are currently
> > done on
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Leaflet/cover (title
> page of
> > brochures for wikimedia and all projects), please
> voice your opinion on
> > the talk page about the drafts and/or submit own
> proposals.
> >
> > == Logos ==
> >
> > The promotion subcom will act as intermediate
> institution between
> > community and board in the process of choosing new
> project logos. It
> > will check if community chosen project logos
> fullfill the necessary
> > requirements (format specification, copyright
> situation etc., see
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logos) to become
> official project logos
> > and submit them with a recommendation to the board
> for approval.
> >
> > == Contact ==
> >
> > You can contact as on
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Promotion, on
> > IRC in #wikimedia-cc (akl and elian) or by email
> to elian(a)djini.de and
> > arne.klempert(a)wikimedia.de
> >
> > If you are interested in the activities of the
> promcom, please get in
> > touch with us.
> >
> > greetings,
> > elian
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
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