Hi Glen,

Unfortunately, from a legal perspective there is no ability to
differentiate what might be called "pure facts" from their expression,
and expressions are copyrighted. Any attempt to extract "pure facts"
from expression without proper license is called plagiarism. If you
think about this in light of the history of authors copying content
from existing works and simply making grammatical changes, we should
probably not go down that road.

There's also the issue that there would have to be a judgement call
for every single instance of content (i.e., every single edit) from
the jspwiki.org site, which would take an impossible amount of time.

The CC-licensed http://doc.jspwiki.org/2.4/ site, yes, that can be
reused without issue:

   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The jspwiki.org site is labeled "Copyright © 2009 individual contributors."
If any of the original authors were to copy content they themselves
wrote off the old wiki onto the new wiki and were careful not to include
content written by others, while I would imagine the Apache Foundation's
lawyers would rightfully recommend against such practices, those authors
(the only potentially injured parties) would in theory be very unlikely
to be able to successfully sue the Apache Foundation for breach of
copyright given they were themselves the perpetrators of the act.

Perhaps a more productive approach would be for the new site to be
populated with new content relevant to the current code base. As you
say, there is a lot of outdated material on the current site, enough that
it's probably quite confusing to people. I was caught out recently trying
to set up security until I realised that I was working from outdated
documentation.

I think I've already mentioned that I'll be able to (on a time-available
basis) be able to update the documentation for the wiki plugins that
are being re-released under neocortext.net by myself and Murray Altheim.
I would do that on the new wiki. If those responsible for the various
managers and components of JSPWiki were to make a similar effort in
documenting them on the new wiki, we'd be a long way towards providing
relatively complete documentation. This would require people to actually
write documentation, which I likewise realise is a commitment of time
that might not be available.

I do think trying to salvage content from a wiki where both copyright
and license are in question is always problematic. The only truly safe
way around this would have been to have had a rights statement (e.g.,
Creative Commons or similar) at the very beginning of the project,
something explicitly stated an agreement upon any contributors
permitting reuse. I don't think anyone could fault Janne for not
having the extreme foresight to have done this at the very birth of
the JSPWiki project.

As to trademark issues, names are enforceable within a domain,
witness "apple" being trademarked separately within computing and
within music recording (of course, that got difficult when the former
began to encroach upon the territory of the latter). But JSPWiki is
a tradename that doesn't exist outside of computing, and both users
of the trademark would be within the same domain. So while Apache
doesn't own "camel.com, it's co-use of "JSPWiki" would likely be
problematic. But if Janne is willing I don't think there'd be any issue
in him simply selling the rights to Apache for $1, i.e., any legal
handover would do.

Ichiro

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Glen Mazza <glen.ma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I wish Janne, you would have gone through jspwiki.org and deleted the 20-60%
> of the site that is obsolete today.  Let's shrink the problem and see where
> we are after that.  At any rate, http://www.jspwiki.org/, as you describe
> it, is an orphan work and probably not usable for us.  Maybe we should just
> shut it down.  If we create our own Wiki (with everything henceforth Apache
> licensed), within a few to several months it will probably repopulate with
> the most useful material that was on the old site anyway.  I would suspect
> pure facts from www.jspwiki.org *can* be transferred to the new site as
> facts aren't copyrightable.
>
> Can the Commons-licensed http://doc.jspwiki.org/2.4/ be donated to Apache or
> does it have the same copyright problem as http://www.jspwiki.org/ ?  It
> would be nice if we could move http://doc.jspwiki.org/2.4/ to the Apache
> site.
>
> Quote: "Well, because of trademark issues it would be odd that Apache would
> use the word JSPWiki and I'd have still control of the domain."  Not
> necessarily, Apache doesn't own www.chemistry.com, www.tomcat.com,
> www.pig.com, www.chemistry.org, www.camel.com, and probably many others.  I
> think the main thing though is that the site can't act like it's the Apache
> product. With the two sites above shut down or moved to Apache, you might
> just be able to release the domain instead of giving it to Apache.
>
> Glen

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