[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia, Emergence, and The Wisdom of Crowds

[Alphax]

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Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Alphax wrote:
> 
>> Since I seem to kill every thread I post to, I'll end this one.
> 
> 
> That's a bloody arrogant attitude.
> 

Sorry, I'm sick of how long this has dragged on for, and often my posts
are never replied to. I see you have no sense of humour.

>> I used {{MultiLicenseMinorPD}} until about 2 days ago, when I say the
>>
>> following on it's talk page:
>>  
>>
>>> Because it's actually legally impossible to grant one's own works
>>> into the public domain in the U.S. and U.K., and this creates serious
>>> potential legal problems, I will deprecate this tag if there is no
>>> dissent for 4 days. Please see [[Wikipedia:You can't grant your work
>>> into the public domain]] for a full explanation along with some
>>> authoritative sources, including the U.S. Copyright Office. I have
>>> created the tags {{TextLicenseMinorFreeUse}}, which reflects the
>>> intent of this template. [[User:Dcoetzee|Deco]] 03:34, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
>>>   
>>
>> As I read it (IANAL), you can't place your work into the public domain
>> because:
>>
> Quoting yourself as an authority is a nice trick if you can get away
> with it.
> 

You missed the tyop then - it should have been clear that /I/ wasn't the
one to write that, from the username and the date. Quoting a single
sentence out of context is a nice trick too.

Doesn't Wikipedia quote itself as an authority? /And/ get away with it?

> Your statement that it is impossible to grant one's works into the
> public domain is patently false.  Copyright is an intellectual property
> right, and it is fundamental to property rights that the owner have the
> right to dispose of his property in whatever manner he sees fit.
> I looked at the page which you mentioned and the only thing that
> purports to be from the copyright office is a single unverifiable
> sentence from a letter received by User:Dcoetzee.  It is completely out
> of contest.  For that sentence to be credible one would need to see the
> entire letter, as well as the letter from the user showing the questions
> that he asked.
> 

I was giving an opinion, and some reasons why I had formed that opinion.
Anyway, I /thought/ that public domain was for things which either had
no copyrightable aspects (eg. with {{PD-ineligible}}) or the copyright
had expired. From what I read, it appeared that you couldn't just
relinquish your rights over something. I'm about 99% certain that you
will never lose authorship rights (ie. you are always the origanl
author), but you only lose royalty etc. rights if you sell them to
someone else, or you have been dead for a while. I'll discuss this with
an economist friend of mine.

>>> Any work receives copyright by default and copyright law generally
>>> doesn't provide any special means to "abandon" copyright so that a
>>> work can enter the public domain
>>>
> While it's true that a work receives a copyright by default as a
> requirement of the Berne Convention, the absence of "special means is
> not a barrier to putting a work into the public domain.
> 

Well, I'm not a copyright lawyer, nor did I ever claim to be. In fact, I
explicity stated that I wasn't.

>>> Some claim that under many jurisdictions, a statement absolving a
>>> copyright or "granting" a work into the public domain has no legal
>>> effect whatsoever, and that the owner still retains all rights to the
>>> work not otherwise released. This person would then have the legal
>>> right to prosecute people who use the work under the false impression
>>> that it was in the public domain. It is certainly true that under
>>> some jurisdictions, it is impossible to release moral rights, though
>>> that is not the case in the United States.
>>>
> Moral rights are another matter, and I realize that they are not a part
> of the US law on this.  For the moment let's stick to US law.  Once the
> situation there is clear it will be easier to consider the matter in the
> light of the law in other countries.
> 

Well, maybe we should just leave it to the lawyers, and stop wasting our
time arguing about things we don't know enough about to reach a proper
conclusion.

> Please do one of two things:
>    1. Cite the section of US statute law which explicitly denies the
> right to abandon all one's rights in a work, or
>    2. Cite a judicial decision which has clearly denied a person's right
> to abandon his copyright.
> 
> In the absence of this I would conclude that you don't know what you're
> talking about.
> 

1. I can't, because I don't have ready access to the US statutes, nor
the legal knowledge to understand them. The small amount of *accurate*
(not from TV) legal knowledge I have is not about the US anyway. English
is spoken in many other places than the US, like the places the original
speakers of English went to apart from North America.

2. There probably haven't been any, and see 1.

3. I never said that I did. Thankyou for making it oh-so-clear as what
the actual legal situation is.

>> *However*, you /can/ release things under a free-for-any-use licence,
>> like {{CopyrightedFreeUse}}, {{NoRightsReserved}}, {{cc-sa}}, etc.
>>
> These are alternative ways of doing things.
> 

I hope so. That's why I've only attempted to release *minor edits*
(which are most likely not copyrightable anyway, due to the /extremely/
minor nature of them) into the public domain, IF this is indeed possible.

>> (Hopes flame war will end now)
>>
> :-D
> 

Are we there yet? :-P

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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