Copyrights/Talk

This page is for discussing the contents of Copyrights.

The following conversation stemmed from several edits on the page of SredniVashtar, and the first one in the thread was a response to in particular.

2009-03-18 08:25:22   Claiming [most comments] under a CC license is bullcrap, and as CP said elsewhere, draconian indeed. I think that's a very poor road to go down. I can think of a few names and details on the tragic deaths page that people wanted removed, and they were out of respect. But where's the line? Remember the Visor Lady page once had a ton of random trivia. If someone wants to remove or integrate most of their prior comments, I say let them. If a comment is that valuable, than it can be integrated into an entry (and thus, the poster's wish of removal is respected while keeping the integrity of the wiki). I think what we're seeing here is a bit of a headstrong opposition to an individual, not to their "valuable" comments. People got annoyed by this dude, and prefer to see the comments up. It's an exchange between individuals, but I don't think it really tells anyone much about the Library - it sure gives us a look at Sredni though. Someone could just wipe the page and integrate in that a bike wall was removed for X reasons. If they want to keep the fun!! stuff that they, the wall was removed for X reasons, though some have suggested it was because of 'Y.'

The whole "CC" thing is a technical point that I doubt would hold up under scrutiny. Not only do you not agree to it when you register, there is no real mention of the CC licensing on the new user sign up page. If you guys want to claim 'fine print' shenanigans, I'm pretty sure there has to be fine print somewhere up where people sign up. (While there is a link at the bottom of the page, it's far down below the sign up information.) Clicking the license link has the disclaimer "This Deed itself has no legal value, and its contents do not appear in the actual license." Awesome. That page, linked from the bottom of every single wikipage, doesn't really cut it *unless* you're talking about stuff you can write (can't copypaste or upload stuff that isn't yours), imo, it's simply a general link about attributing work. I clicked through for the full license, and "work" (or adaption), even loosely defined as they have it, is nowhere near a typical wiki page comment. Most importantly, none of that is mentioned on the signup page *specifically* for new users to notice. Nowhere is there an agreement to any type of terms when you register. This type of claim is not even in the tiniest bit loosely hinted at in the "license" link. The actual link from the link is stretched to the point of sillyness if you want to count wiki page comments as "work" comparable to a book, pamphlet, or lecture (which I suppose would be the closest claims possible from the list). Back to this specific case: if there's valuable information in a comment chain, integrate it in. —ES

• If what you're saying about the license is true, then Davis Wiki has serious legal problems. Any person could come on and post copyrighted content using a comment. They could then say "Why are you releasing my work under a CC license?", and proceed to sue us. We can't have them agree to any one license when they create an account, because each wiki has its own license. So the best solution, it appears, is to disable the comments macro permanently. —BrentLaabs
  

• Only when all comments are a body or adaption of work. We all know it's not about a comment, it's about the content. There's a vast difference between a comment, or the things described in the license. On occassion, people have uploaded .pdf's here. People upload pictures frequently, and there's been dozens of times it's pictures they shouldn't really use. Of course, if they took it themselves, it's a-ok. Similarly, copying a huge chunk of text about a county-owned park from the county's website is not alright without proper attribution. Perhaps there should be some sort of agreement option to the licensing terms, but that's not the point I was making. My point was trying to prevent people from deleting their own commentary and crediting it to the CC licensing thing is silly and very doubtful. Usually I agree with this editor, but the edit log info here is the thing I'm talking about: "Interesting. It's CC licensed, anyway." Does anyone here honestly think Sredni's comments about whether the library got rid of the wall because it promoted riffraff hanging around is honestly CC-licensed as the terms are stated? Is that in any way comparable to people copy-pasting from Wikipedia and uploading pictures from business websites? No, I think most of us would agree it's not. But I guess we could always have a giant discussion about technicalities, which I'm sure would be a blast. I'll repeat what I said above in that I often think this type of problem could always be avoided by either integrating it or not. His attitude or words aren't what's important, the wall being removed supposedly is. That's why I integrated a paragraph into the proper page and deleted the thread.
  

If you're serious about people joining different wiki's with different licensing, I suppose that's a technical issue for the developers to tackle since registration moved over to the wiki spot. I had assumed they were all with the same general CC thing. The CC agreement isn't really my concern, it was just a roundabout side rant pointing out it's silly to cling to. The issue of people deleting comments has come up several times before; I understand it on some pages, specifically discussion orientated pages, but think going down the "once it's posted, it's licensed" ideology is very bad (and not true the majority of time). If someone were to delete a chunk of information they had added to a page's entry (such as historical background and the like), then try to retract it, I think that is far more solid grounds to claim that (unless that information were untrue, which has come up before as well). ES


• Well, I'm glad we had a lawyer here to explain all the technicalities of Creative Commons. —BrentLaabs
  

• I have no idea what the technicalities are, and never even skimmed any of it today. I only did because I think it is, as Philip so elegantly put it, jackassery when people try to play the "it's licensed!" card unfairly. I agree 100% with Philip's comment below this, and that's the spirit I was attempting to get across. It's also exactly what I did in the Sredni case: I tried to edit his name to initials and delinked it, to keep the thread alive as was. When there was refusal, I attempted to simply integrate the whole thing to the page. -ES

On point here: "My point was trying to prevent people from deleting their own commentary and crediting it to the CC licensing thing is silly and very doubtful." I agree, at least in spirit. If people want to remove their own comments then I think we should respect that and integrate the comment's content into the entry. Making a legal argument is jackassery.

Though, if it's a particularly good comment / thread that can't be integrated, removing names might be okay. People typically either want to remove their name from various places or take back something they said (e.g. they now think it was foolish or damaging). We can't really guess at what someone's motivation is, so I don't think there should be a hard and fast guideline for anything like this. -PhilipNeustrom

2009-10-9 03:29:00   From the entry, Note: Wikipedia is considering relicensing its content to cc-by-sa by August 1, 2009. See Wikipedia#License_and_language_editions. Alas, that's still incompatible (and more explicitly so) with Davis Wiki.

It looks like this went through, how are these two CC licenses not compatible? Because Davis Wiki doesn't use the Share Alike requirement and Wikipedia does? Could someone explain to me? Thanks! —DanWillenbring

• Yes. You can use CC-By virtually anywhere you want — a co-op or apartment complex can put together a "welcome to the neighborhood" packet for new residents, a teen basketball league can use the text from their wiki entry as a starting point to build their own website, or even a newspaper can use the wiki as source. They all just have to acknowledge the origin of the text, and if possible, link to it. CC-By-SA has an addition requirement that the new work has to be licensed under a share alike license. CC-By can be used anywhere, CC-By-SA is restricted to only works that are under the same (or, since it's "Alike", similar) licenses. -jw