Project Copyright/Discussion

GNU Open Content

I said I'd put up the GNU Free Documentation License, but it's just as much up to other contributors as myself. Feel free to discuss below. – Tarquin

Fair Use

Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

The fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -

(1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) The nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors

Moral Rights

Tarquin writes: I note with interest that the USA doesn't recognize article 6bis of the Berne Convention, namely so-called "moral rights". This puts an interesting slant on things, as under international law, you have moral rights in what you create, which can not be transferred or licensed.
Since AFAIK this server is in the US, while some writers are out of it, which law applies?
I don't want to put people off from contributing but a legal mind would be handy. Feel free to tell me I'm talking gibberish, but roughly & off the top of my head I'd say that submitting material to the Wiki implicitly grants other contributors the right to make changes, corrections, enhancements and additions. The project as a whole body of work is copyright as open content – this is really (in my mind) to prevent a publisher lifting it verbatim & publishing it in book or magazine form. Something similar happened to MathWorld a while ago, so don't knock it, it could happen when the volume of material becomes sufficiently large. Something like a compiled Help file, that is distributed gratis and fully credits the project & contributors is a different matter entirely . Of course by then we won't really know who wrote exactly what; hence the implicit agreement that moral rights of the individual contributor are integrated into the project as a whole.
...
or something...

Copyright is a two-edged sword. If someone posts copyright material WE could be sued, though it's more likely we'd just have to remove it and even more likely that no-one would notice (but that is NO EXCUSE). But copyright also protects the content of this site from being ripped off. I'm not doing this for any financial reward, but I don't want to see someone else make a profit from hard work that people put in here for free.
And BTW, I'm not really a leader. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. ;-) – Tarquin

So he's a 'cavalier' huh? what do you know? Moose of the world rejoice ! Tao

I'm not going to secede from the United States ;-) , but I will say that I think the US policies on international law are absolute crap. These range from this to land mines to environmental controls. I think most things on the internet are generally considered international. This can be seen by the fact that no one taxes the internet, and so on and so forth. I think putting this out as copywrighted under international standards is good. Birelli

reconn: I uploaded the [Creative Commons] 'some rights' image (creative_commons-somerights). Thoughts? (er, on cc license use.. not on the availability of the image)

DJPaul: I don't think sublicensing Wiki content you have created is a good idea, even with a fairly lax license.

Mychaeel: While I agree with DJPaul that this is a matter that has to be discussed, I had a first glance at the Creative Commons license and I must admit I like it.

Tarquin: I'm with Mych. The "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license seems fairly close to our intentions.

DJPaul: Hey, hey! Quit it! :stupid: My qualm was with the issue of sublicensing, not of the actual license.

reconn: Despite the opening line of this page, copyright doesn't need to be obtained. In the act of creating something new or – in this case – writing something, you have the sole right to copy it. It seems to me the essense of the Project Copyright is affirming that the authors retain copyright, but that it's forced open. I want to use Creative Commons as a way to refine and emphasize the freedoms granted to the things I write here.

Tarquin: Quite right. I think it was a Grungeism. Gone.

DJPaul: I'm all confused now, i'm out of here. Bye.

For your considering, I think that it's very unlikely you can get away with redistributing the entire site as a ZIP or a CD without getting the permission from each and every contributor author. At least it's not very ethical. Personally, I'm not very confident that I can stretch the provision very far on MeatballWiki. I merely wanted to provide some reasonable description of what would happen if MeatballWiki had to publish particular pages as static text, such as a standard like MeatBall:ModWiki. – SunirShah

Mychaeel: See Project Copyright (unchanged since almost a year ago) – plus, the discussion on Offline Wiki has been there for a long time before I replaced it by the current page (see older revisions), and our local Wikizens here have been unambiguously supportive of the thought. At the end of the day it's just a temporary copy, like what you're doing all the time with your browser cache.

Mychaeel: In fact, browsing MeatBall logo MeatballWikiCopyright, I find: "Additionally, you grant Meatball a non-exclusive perpetual royalty-free universal license to distribute the content in its archives, or distribute the content in a compilation of selected Meatball content. The redistributed material will be timestamped."

CH3Z: Should you have a disclaimer above the edit box on the the edit pages to the effect:
Note: You are hereby knowingly adding information to a publicly displayed document. Please, be respectfull of the intellectual property of others. ??

Mychaeel: There's also a text "Don't create a page just to test whether it works" and people still do it. – It should be self-evident that copyrighted content requires permission to be used anywhere, including the Wiki. If it's not for somebody I doubt adding another note to that effect will change a thing.

DJPaul: Also sounds a bit formal, and might scare would-be contributors off.

pgibbs: Hi. I'm coding my own Wiki for various reasons, and like most Wikis, intend to ship some 'default' pages with it. Can I/do I have permission to base some of the content of these Default pages from pages of a similar nature from the Unreal Wiki (Which wouldn't surprise me if, in turn, that these didn't come from UseMod or MeatBall or somesuch); specifically, most of the text on the following pages (not exactly - situtation and spelling/punctuation/grammar but the text will stay mainly in form) - the Wiki FAQ page, the Sandbox and the New Users Quick Start page.

FYI I have not yet decided what license I'm going to have with my Wiki, but I expect it will be open-source or public domain.

pgibbs: Also, could I gain permission to use those nice little interwiki link icons?

Tarquin: The interwiki icons are just shrunken versions of the site logos – feel free to copy them. You're right, the FAQ was inspired by the Meatball / Wikiwiki version. The Wiki Markup page is borrowed from Wikipedia. The other two were written from scratch for this place. Sure, you can use them. What are you coding your wiki in, BTW?

pgibbs: Thanks. I'm coding it in PHP as a Postnuke module, as the only Wiki that integrates into Postnuke is a very old version of the phpWiki.