[Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

Wed Dec 8 16:41:32 UTC 2004

user_Jamesday wrote:

>Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a license incompatible with all of their existing licenses. That rules out any likely form of copyleft if the project is to achieve its major goal, though with sufficient studying of all of the contracts news publishers have with their new sources I suppose it's conceivable that some form of copyleft license could be written to be incompatible with a small enough set of them for small publishers to use stories.
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>Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.
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I've been lurking on here and I felt I need to respond to this message.

Copyleft is not to limit people who can use a work (like software or a 
book), but rather a way to force attribution and to avoid pitfalls of 
the "public domain" documents.  If it is in the "public domain", all you 
have to do is a minor change and suddenly the work can now be 
copyrighted.  The publisher does not have to clarify what is free 
material that can be copied and what is original new material.  An 
example of this is the Clement C. Moore Poem "'Twas the Night Before 
Christmas", which is in the public domain (due to copyright expiration), 
but often they change the final phrase from "Happy Christmas" to "Merry 
Christmas", call it a new work, and copyright the book.  To enforce it 
more, publishers also include new illustrations of Santa, but if you 
read inside the cover there is no mention that the poem itself is in the 
public domain.

This is where the GFDL is very different, as anything that copies a GFDL 
licenced document must also specify somehow what rights you have as an 
end consumer.  The same is true for GPL'd software as well.

Even the BSD license (which has almost no real restrictions) does have 
the attribution clause that forces you to acknowledge from whom you got 
the document and that it is copyrighted material.

And in the case of "mainstream" news agencies, including television & 
radio stations (as well as print media), when they cover something from 
a wire agency they almost always give attribution in the form of 
"According to the Associated Press" or "from wire reports" or "as 
published in a copyrighted article in the Washington Post".  In this 
case Wikinews has the potential of becoming another news outlet where 
newspapers would start out with something like "Moscow (Wikinews) - 
President Putin..."

Where I think the license discussion should go along is to discuss what 
features authors would like to see, what features from common copyleft 
licenses most people here hate, and what the overall goals of the 
project are.  A copyleft license can be applied to a news article that 
could also be republished by "mainstream" news outlets.... the two are 
not mutually incompatable.  Unfortunately most of the discussion I've 
seen so far is going into the gritty details and political camps of each 
different license.

IMHO, I think a simple attribution that the story came from Wikinews, 
and in print media something in a little more detail giving either a URL 
to Wikinews or a statement in the copyright section of the publication 
(most magazines and newspapers have them buried on page 3 or on the 
editorial page somewhere... usually in very fine print) that says 
Wikinews articles are republished under the XXX license.  see 
http://www.example.com for more details.  Web magazines can do something 
very similar (as well as websites for mainstream news organizations that 
want to republish wikinews pieces).  Television news broadcasts 
typically have a quick blurb at the end giving credit to news sources, 
especially if it is from another network or station. These usually 
scroll by so quickly that you can hardly read them, but are a way to 
give attribution.

The point here is to acknowledge that somebody other than that news 
agency created the story, and they are only republishing what can be 
obtained elsewhere as a convience to their readers.  I don't see how 
this really limits who or how you can use content that is copylefted, 
and is incompatable with commercial news wire licenses only if those 
other licenses specifically mention that they can't be used together 
with other wire services or specifically mention copylefted news 
articles used simultaneously in the same publication.  It is likely that 
at least in the USA such prohibitions could also be made illegal due to 
anti-trust laws, and I know the EU also has simular anti-competition 
laws as well, protecting a small-town newspaper that might want to use 
Wikinews articles in their publication (for instance).

-- 
Robert Scott Horning