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Mark Christensen | 1 May 2002 16:16

RE: Collection copyrights

This raises an important question in my mind.  The Wikipedia FAQ says that
"the articles" are licensed under the FDL, but says nothing about the
collection.  Is it, like all of the articles, licensed under the FDL? 

It has been my understanding that Bomis has released the collection under
the terms of the Free Document License, but, as I did  a quick search of the
list archive and on the wikipedia I find that it shows no specific text
stating that this is the case.   

I did find an e-mail from Larry Sanger saying that he thought everybody
assigned copyright to Bomis, and then Bomis which licensed everything thing
under the GNU/FDL.  I think the part about copyright assignment has been
hashed out sufficiently on this list, but I would like clarification on the
issue of the license status of the collection. 

My best guess is that it is. I'm fairly certain that Jimbo and Larry
intended for the entirety of the "free encyclopedia" to be licensed under
the FDL.  If I am correct in assuming that the FDL also applies to the
collection copyright, then I'd amend Lee's analysis to mention that: though
copyright law gives Bomins the right to control the use of the wikipedia
collection, the FDL explicitly allows republication and modification.
Therefore anyone who downloads and republishes the wikipedia would not be in
violation of copyright unless they violate the terms of the FDL.  Moreover,
since it is only the FDL that grants anybody the right to reproduce
Wikipedia articles at all, it is not particularly burdensome to be required
to abide by the FDL if somebody publishes enough of it to violate Bomis's
collection copyright. 

-----Original Message-----
From: lcrocker@... [mailto:lcrocker <at> nupedia.com]
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lcrocker | 1 May 2002 18:42

Re: Collection copyrights

You Wrote:

> This raises an important question in my mind.  The Wikipedia FAQ
> says that "the articles" are licensed under the FDL, but says
> nothing about the collection.  Is it, like all of the articles,
> licensed under the FDL? 

That's my understanding of how it should be as well, and that's
what I wrote up in Wikipedia:Copyrights for Jimbo's approval.
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Axel Boldt | 3 May 2002 01:16
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Re: Collection copyright

[about collection copyrights:]

>There's a little more to it than that: copyrights apply to "creative
>expression", and "selection" of what to present is a creative act
>specifically recognized (see Feist v. Rural).  

Ok, but neither Bomis nor anybody else can claim a collection
copyright over Wikipedia in this sense, since nobody, and certainly
not Bomis, actively selects articles for presentation in a manner that
could be called creative expression. Or maybe: we all own tiny bits of
the collection copyright in this sense, since we all occasionly reject
articles. 

Axel
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lcrocker | 3 May 2002 02:21

Re: Collection copyright

You Wrote:
>[about collection copyrights:]
>
>>There's a little more to it than that: copyrights apply to "creative
>>expression", and "selection" of what to present is a creative act
>>specifically recognized (see Feist v. Rural).  
>
>Ok, but neither Bomis nor anybody else can claim a collection
>copyright over Wikipedia in this sense, since nobody, and certainly
>not Bomis, actively selects articles for presentation in a manner 
that
>could be called creative expression. Or maybe: we all own tiny bits 
of
>the collection copyright in this sense, since we all occasionly 
reject
>articles. 

Actually, that's a very good argument that an infringer will
probably bring up if we ever sue one.  We probably still have to
claim the copyright, or else the suit would never get past the
standing requirement.  It's perfectly acceptable to make the
claim even if it won't hold up, and in fact failure to make a
claim can be detrimental.

So in short, I think you may be right, but I'm not going to change
the text of Wikipedia:Copyrights over it.
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Jimmy Wales | 5 May 2002 22:05

Re: Collection copyrights

Right.  (I'm back, by the way, but will be deeply behind in email for a few
days.)

The only real reason to consider what kind of copyright Bomis might
have in the collection of articles is to consider whether we have
standing to sue people who violate the GFDL.  My position is that the
individual articles are released GFDL by the author(s), and the
collection is released GFDL by Bomis.  (And the software is all GPL.)

Let's imagine a scenario.  Imagine that a paper-book publisher
downloads our tarball and polishes it into multi-volume book form.
That's great!  But let's imagine further that they publish it merely
with a copyright notice, i.e. they don't relicense it.  Imagine still
further that they start sending someone (or me!) cease-and-desist
letters for copying and modifying "their" version.

I'd like to serve as a convenient focal point for a lawsuit against
them.

However, it's probably a minor point either way.  If someone did
something that annoyed the community, I have little doubt that we
could quickly work together to establish ownership of a significant
portion.  At that time, I could offer to buy individual copyrights
from you all, i.e. we could go through the copyright assignment
process.

I think that in reality, all of this is fairly pedantic, though.  If
someone tried to violate the GFDL, there would be such a huge outcry
from the wider free software community, that almost anyone would have
to back down in the face of the negative publicity.
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Karen AKA Kajikit | 8 May 2002 11:25
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eeps! What's happened to the Wikipedia????

I just tried to open it up and got an error message - 'supplied argument
is not a valid MySQL result' etc etc...

Who broke the pedia?

--

-- 

Karen AKA Kajikit

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating 

Love and huggles to all!
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kband | 8 May 2002 22:57

Re: [Wikitech-l] two suggestions

=?iso-8859-1?q?Chuck=20Smith?= wrote:
> 
> Improving performance on English server:  when the
> server reaches a certain threshhold of activity could
> we replace the text of all the Special pages with:
> 
> "This page is currently inaccessible because of the
> immensive amount of traffic we're getting.  Wikipedia
> is just too popular."

Removing Recent Changes functionality removes most of the
functionality for me as an editor...taking it down would be almost as
bad as the current molasses we're in.

A much better suggestion would be to fix the code. My completely
unhelpful suspicion is that it's PHP's fault. But I'm a perl bigot, so
take it for what it's worth. I'm just not surprised we're having
problems.

--tc
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Jimmy Wales | 8 May 2002 22:39

Re: Re: [Wikitech-l] two suggestions

kband@... wrote:
> Removing Recent Changes functionality removes most of the
> functionality for me as an editor...taking it down would be almost as
> bad as the current molasses we're in.

Yeah, totally.  Recent Changes is an absolute necessity.

But if we find out that some of the other "neat tricks" are weighing us down, we
could cut them out temporarily.

> A much better suggestion would be to fix the code. My completely
> unhelpful suspicion is that it's PHP's fault. But I'm a perl bigot, so
> take it for what it's worth. I'm just not surprised we're having
> problems.

I'm a perl fanatic, but not a perl bigot.  I haven't really considered
that PhP would be the culprit.
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lcrocker | 9 May 2002 00:21

Re: [Wikitech-l] two suggestions

> A much better suggestion would be to fix the code. My
> completely unhelpful suspicion is that it's PHP's fault.
> But I'm a perl bigot, so take it for what it's worth. I'm
> just not surprised we're having problems.

Right suggestion, wrong reason.  I rather suspected PHP
as well, but now that I've lived and breathed the code for
a week or so, I'm quite statisfied that PHP is more than
fast enough.  The present code, on the other hand, with all
due respect and admiration for Magnus's tireless efforts,
is a mess.  It has no architecture or design to speak of,
and does lots of unnecessary work, including many redundant
database fetches.

I'm working on it.  I'll release working snapshots of my
version as I complete things that the other developers can
test, but I'd also like to see our develop-test-install
process cleaned up before we jump headlong into anything.
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Ian | 9 May 2002 01:17
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Re: Re: [Wikitech-l] two suggestions

There needs to a series of mirrors to show static pages, and wikipedia.com
only used for Recent Changes and editing. Their would still be a lot of
load on wikipedia.com but not as much, and if you just have to look
something up it would be easier. The mirrors could update about once or
twice a day.

School ends on the 24th, hopefully I'll be able to implement it this
summer. It would just need something to automatically produce static pages
which the mirrors would somehow be informed of what to download or it
could all be bziped up, whatever. I'll try to make it in as seperate files
as possible so it doesn't have to actually be implemented until its ready
and wanted.

Ian Monroe
http://ian.webhop.org

On Wed, 8 May 2002, kband@... XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> =?iso-8859-1?q?Chuck=20Smith?= wrote:
> >
> > Improving performance on English server:  when the
> > server reaches a certain threshhold of activity could
> > we replace the text of all the Special pages with:
> >
> > "This page is currently inaccessible because of the
> > immensive amount of traffic we're getting.  Wikipedia
> > is just too popular."
>
> Removing Recent Changes functionality removes most of the
> functionality for me as an editor...taking it down would be almost as
(Continue reading)

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Gmane