[Foundation-l] Dual-Licensing Wiktionary :fr ?

[Jerome Banal]

Hello Gerard,

Hmm, this is pretty adventurous, isn't it?
GPL is not compatible with GFDL and a poll to change a license of current
content is only valid if the license is entitled to the community as a
collaborative work and not to contributors like in the case of Wikimedia
projects. Otherwise, you should be only able to get edits made 100% by
people who agreed (but I guess, you know all that already).

Also, in some countries (France for example), there is a "database-specific
copyright law" that may apply on dictionaries (a structured list of
synonyms, translations and all being nothing more than a database for the
law) and which basically forbids to copy a "substantial amount" -both in
term of data fields and entries- of a database (if you read some French:
http://www.murielle-cahen.com/p_base_de_donnees.asp).

Thanks,
Jerome Banal


2006/11/15, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>
> Hoi,
> Let me explain why WiktionaryZ allows for what are in effect two
> licenses that are not compatible otherwise.
>
> It is not possible to copyright facts. It is however possible to
> copyright collections of facts. Every Wiktionary is a collection of
> facts but there is no single person who owns this copyright. At best
> there is a formal owner; the Wikimedia Foundation and there is a
> practical owner that is its community. There are arguments about
> definitions being copyrightable and there have been court cases about
> this. It was typically found that there is often only one way of
> defining certain things. This resulted in many dictionaries having bogus
> information that only aims to "prove" that when found, the content of
> their collection was illegally copied.
>
> For WiktionaryZ we have defined success as: "When people find an
> application for our data that we did not think about, that is success".
> The consequence is that the data has to be available for inclusions in
> applications. This means that we aim to provide the data in STANDARD
> export formats. The data has to be identifiable to be in a recognised
> language, a recognised script and a recognised orthography. There are
> few practical standards for this. We went on a limb by choosing
> ISO-639-3. This is the best currently available but this still does not
> provide sufficient granularity. This may only arrive with the ISO-639-6.
>
> When the data itself cannot be "protected" with licenses or copyright,
> the question is what is it that we want from the copyright, the license.
> What we want to make plane is that the data is available at WiktionaryZ
> for any purposes and that we REALLY want people to help us complete
> curate our data. This is what the CC-by allows us to do. It is possible
> to include the data necessary to build OpenOffice (or any other) spell
> checkers. These can be re-build every week. As long as the end-user
> knows how and where to fix errors and omissions, we have the
> functionality of our license. This is what mandatory attribution provides.
>
> When a Wiktionary community wants to /cooperate /with WiktionaryZ, there
> are several ways in which this can be done. We can have interwiki links
> on the Wiktionaries articles to WiktionaryZ. When people want to use the
> WZ content in Wiktionary they can. When a Wiktionary community wants to
> /integrate /their data in WiktionaryZ integrally, they can vote on this.
> >From the WZ point of view, if there is at least a 75% majority of the
> active community in favour, it should provide enough clarity required to
> investigate the integration of the data of that Wiktionary into
> WiktionaryZ. In the past several large collections under other licenses
> like the GPL have been integrated into the different Wiktionaries. The
> copyright holders of these collections may find it in themselves to
> grant WiktionaryZ this same privilege they gave to the Wiktionary
> projects.
>
> When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used under
> a less Free license, you only need to attribute.
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
>
> Jerome Banal wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving
> /new/
> > edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to
> dual
> > licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about
> whether
> > we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk
> with
> > you all.
> >
> > So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would be
> > useful.
> >
> > The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a better
> > cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as
> > specified above. It basically means that we can take its content under
> GFDL
> > license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL and
> CC-by
> > at the same time. Which is not our case.
> >
> > Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content would
> make
> > them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would help us
> > making progress in the future in several possible ways (software part,
> data
> > part...).
> >
> >
> > What would be the consequences about this license modification ?
> >
> > * A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of
> change
> > would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with users),
> new
> > edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still reuse
> the
> > whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.
> >
> > * As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ), Wiktionary
> > content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under any
> > compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you give
> > attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the original
> > remains free so it should not be a big deal).
> >
> > * Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be
> possible
> > without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are not
> > insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.
> >
> > * If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have to
> > request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is
> more
> > free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less restrictions,
> > including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be more
> > difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the
> > enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a
> different
> > license choice.
> >
> >
> > So there are good points (better collaborative work with WiktionaryZ)
> and
> > bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources
> -like
> > some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of articles in
> the
> > past and of derivative works).
> >
> > OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should
> > Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does that
> just
> > sound bad to you?
> >
> > Thanks all,
> > Jerome Banal
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