[Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

Tue Dec 14 09:15:08 UTC 2004

----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 01:23:51 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

>The license will only affect whatever article they copy. If the
>CC-by-sa is used, then all they need do is add an attribution line at the end
>of the article and mention of the license. Extending the same rights to users
>of their version as we have given to them is not asking much at all. Pretty
>darn cheap price in fact. 

I have the same feeling as mav that complying with CC-by-sa is not very 
much difficult. I see that easier than complying with GFDL. 
But there are stil some requirements in CC-by-sa that would deter mainstream 
media from using Wikinews contents. (I attach details of problems of GFDL 
and CC-by-sa at the end of this email). One is the attribution 
requirement, because some Wikinews articles have many authors. 

That makes me think that 
1) CC-sa might be better for this project, if people do not care for getting credits. 
2) A custom-made license based on CC-sa, but allowing derivative works 
relicensed under other licenses including GFDL and CC-by-sa is possibly even a better option. 

If we give up attribution requirements, we could lose some potential contributors. 
That is bad. But at the same time, if attribution requirements cannot reasonably be enforced, 
or enforcing it would make potential reusers give up our contents, that could well be worse. 

Regards, 

Tomos

Attachment:

Here are major problems that I can see with GFDL when a 
mainstream press wants to use Wikinews article with some 
modification. 

But please be aware that I am not a lawyer. 

Creative Commons' Attribution-ShareAlike is free of many of these 
potential problems, but importantly, it is not free from the #2 &5. 

1) Sec. 1, 4-B, & 4-C Creating Title Page and offering certain information 
in the page. According to the GFDL, "For works in formats which do not 
have any title page as such, "Title Page" means the text near the most 
prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the 
body of the text." Title Page should include a list of author(s) of the modified 
version and at least five of the principal authors of the previous versions. 
It should also include the name of the publisher of the modified version. 

I think this alone could be a big deterrent for mainstream print press. 
(And think how unprofessional it would look like if they see names like 
Tomos among the authors...I better change my username if GFDL is selected.)

2) Sec. 4-I. To preserve history. An article could be edited by 5, 10, or 
more times. GFDL requires them to list all of them. This requirement is not as 
bad for Wikinews as for Wikipedia, because the avarage # of editors are smaller. 

As a sidenote, one active participant at English Wikinews recently made a 
remark that a quality article would take 5 to 10 people involved in the process. I 
personally had the same estimate. 
( http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Quality_over_Quantity ) 

3) Sec. 4-J. To preserve network locations of all previous versions of 
the document. 

4) Sec. 3. To offer the work without copy & access protection measures. 
This increases handling costs of the Wikinews-derived articles. They 
would need some special arrangements in order to offer the Wikinews-derived 
articles in subscription-based, protected database services or sell those 
articles to database companies offering such services. If there are enough 
useful articles from Wikinews, that would be worth. 

5) License interpretation uncertainties - the above requirements are 
based on the interpretation that each individual article is a work. Some 
people think the whole wiki is a single work. In that case, the reusers have 
to do things differently because its authors & its history could be different. 

6) Uncertainty regarding the scope of permission. GFDL may or may not include 
performance rights-related permissions, such as broadcasting an audio news clip
online or offline. (It clearly covers reproduction, modification, distribution, 
and translation.) CC-by-sa does include permission to "publicly perform" and 
"publicly digitally perform" among its license grants. (I got this idea from 
Carbuncle's blog, to his credit. And if you don't know, he is a Japanese 
Wikipedian. http://carbuncle.blogtribe.org/entry-bd867be802a865689471b5876e86af31.html)