[Foundation-l] Authoring on wikijunior : providing private information.

Sat Oct 8 02:07:33 UTC 2005

Nicholas Moreau wrote:

>On 10/6/05, foundation-l-request at wikimedia.org <
>foundation-l-request at wikimedia.org> wrote:What I am asking for is that if
>you want to claim copyright on your contribution, you need to give this
>minimum amount of information for legal protection and to give a realistic
>copyright claim on your contributions. As it stands right now, there is no
>way that you can realisticly claim copyright on any of your contributions
>right now, and certainly there is no way that you canresolve potential
>copyright claims on material if it goes to court in a dispute.
>
>
>Okay, suppose I didn't include my information, and I wanted to claim
>copyright on content in Wikijunior.
>
>I take the Foundation to court, saying "I CLAIM MY COPYRIGHT ON THIS!"
>
>The defendant's lawyer says "But, you can't. On the website, when you
>contribute anything to any Wikimedia project, it says that you're
>contributing this info to the Wikimedia Foundation."
>
>Like, seeing that I have my information on the "contributors" page, does
>that mean I own part of the Wikijunior project, and thus can profit from my
>"share" of the contribution? Every time one issue of the books is published,
>$0.02 come rolling into my PayPal account? What? If that's the case, I'm
>doing fifty edits under fifty different usernames.
>
>I honestly am dumb-founded on what you consider "claiming [my] copyright",
>on something solely copyrighten by the foundation.
>
>Nick/Zanimum
>  
>
I think you miss the point.  The Foundation does not claim copyright on 
anything for any Wikimedia project.  There is a legitmate reason to do 
this, and a good one as well.  All the Wikimedia Foundation does is 
claim trademarks on commonly used images and names that relate directly 
to each one of the projects, and this is proper as well.  I can't set up 
another web site and claim it is Wikipedia with Wikipedia content...that 
is a violation of trademark.  In order to enforce copyright, it is up to 
the individual authors for each web page to do the enforcement and keep 
violators from getting away with breaking the law.

The real issue is if somebody, like Microsoft Press or Prentiss-Hall, 
decides to claim copyright on something found on a Wikimedia Project, 
like one of the Wikijunior books, and decides instead to claim copyright 
on it for themselves.  They do some "minor" modifications of the 
content, research the images to make sure they are free and clear to 
reproduce, and then say "to heck with the GFDL... we don't care" and 
publish the book anyway as if they wrote it themselves.

They can even go back and claim that the material on Wikibooks in this 
case is violating their copyright even and force the removal of the 
content on Wikibooks.

As far as the "contributors" page is concerned, who are they?  Where are 
they from?  Can you certify that the author mentioned in the 
contributors page even exist?  Really, are you sure it isn't somebody 
else?  Are you sure they are in the USA/France/Germany like you claim 
they are?  Are you sure that it wasn't some hacker in Mongolia where 
international copyright doesn't apply?  Prove it.  What court has 
juristiction on enforcing the author's wishes?  You can't even be sure 
who the author is, so why do you think a particular court even has a 
right to prosecute?  So you think the server is in the USA and therefore 
the USA has original juristiction on prosecuting copyright because of 
the foundation.  Guess what, the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't claim 
copyright on any of the material, so that claim is thrown out.  Now what?

It gets even worse.  Because we can point to comments here on this 
mailing list and on several talk pages that not only is this information 
(about the country of birth and nationality of each author, together 
with each full real name) is not collected but there seems to be 
"official" opposition to even collecting it, all contributions can be 
argued as anonymous contributions.  This wasn't just an oversight from 
somebody not understanding copyright, but a deliberate policy of 
removing identification related to user contributions even with 
specifics of copyright law being explained.

In short, yes, we know who has contributed what stuff to each Wikimedia 
article/module/entry but trying to prove authorship is going to be a 
major headache if any single page is going to be challenged on its 
copyright claim.  Already I've seen supposed copyright violations when 
in fact it was the "other" website that was violating copyright of the 
authors of a particular page.  It is just a matter of time before 
something on one of the Wikimedia projects is going to be challenged and 
"forced" to be removed, not because of an obvious copyright violation 
from a previously published source but because the copyright of the 
Wikimedia content is in doubt.

In addition, one of the reasons I asked for this information is that I 
intend to do a formal copyright registration on Wikijunior books when I 
send them into print format.  I've already taken one Wikijunior book 
down to a printing company and made a copy that I can send around to 
some people as the tangible results of these projects.  As a part of 
this formal registration which I don't need any permission to do, I am 
required by law when filing the registration to try and find all 
copyright claims on the material that I am registering.  At least a 
reasonable attempt at collecting the information.  In the case of the 
Wikijunior Solar System book, there are over 50 different contributors, 
and it would be nice to be able to give credit to all of them, and give 
them all a "stake" in the book as it goes to press.  I was trying to be 
polite and ethical as I can, and then I find people like you, Zanimum, 
who not only object to me collecting this from people voluntarily, but 
seek to stop me from trying to collect this information altogether.

I do think this information can and should be a part of the "user" 
record for each Media Wiki user, and adding the information is very 
trivial to accomplish from the viewpoint of a developer.  Like I said, 
voluntary information only, and you don't have to include the 
information if you don't want to, but why it shouldn't be listed as 
another field on the user preferences page is beyond my comprehension. 
 And it can save us some headaches in the future as well.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning