[Wikimedia-l] "Tweet this page" from some or all sites???

[David Gerard]

On 19 April 2013 01:43, Matthew Roth <mroth at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> First, note that most of the really popular social networking sites have
> boilerplate language in the Terms of Service that are incompatible with
> CC-BY-SA. See Michelle Paulson's legal analysis related to Facebook here:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal_and_Community_Advocacy/CC-BY-SA_on_Facebook
>
> You cannot post 3rd party CC-BY-SA licensed images to Facebook (and likely
> most other social networks) because you will be violating the sublicensing
> section of the CC license, and arguably the ToS of the social network. This
> isn't a small matter. If you look at a number of the Wikimedia movement
> partners and Wikimedians who use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. they
> are posting images that violate the license. We were doing the same at WMF
> until Michelle produced her guidance. We've tried to find all instances
> where we had uploaded images, instead replacing them with links (the
> auto-generated thumbnails are not a concern, legally).
>
> Although the legal team hasn't published formal guidance on the other
> social networks, a survey of their terms of service show a very similar
> sublicensing clause. I'm not super optimistic that we can participate fully
> with them, so that's why we have not had an active presence on, for
> example, Pinterest. They make such heavy use of images in their pins and I
> don't see a workable way forward at present, despite how much I like their
> site aesthetically.
>
> I would love to find a solution to the problem from a licensing standpoint.
> IMO, using images on social networks is a fantastic way to promote the
> projects and hopefully encourage more people to participate/contribute, but
> I don't think it's something we can reasonably do at present.


Worth a small public grumble on the blog? The TOS incompatibility is
not well known.


- d.