I was repeating CC0 without checking (partly because I thought I'd heard that before). Actually, the edit page *DOES* say CC0 "By saving a change to this wiki, you agree that your contribution is given freely to the world under CC0. Yippee!" What it should probably also say is "and you have the rights to make this grant." However, that's in conflict with the license statement below...
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 12:36 PM, Karen Coyle <[email protected]> wrote: > > The OL "license terms" are the IA "license terms" -- thus: > http://archive.org/about/terms.php The "license" which is linked to from the site itself is at http://openlibrary.org/developers/licensing and it says, in part: "The Internet Archive does not assert any new copyright or other proprietary rights over any of the material in the Open Library database. There may be existing rights issues on some contributions and in some jurisdictions. " which is, quite frankly, a huge cop out. That effectively says that no one can use the information because you have no idea what rights and restrictions apply. The only thing I can guess is that they either didn't have the CC0 requirement in the early days or they imported data of dubious provenance early on. The only reasonable way to run a shared database like this is the way Wikipedia, Freebase, etc do it. That is, decide what your license is going to be, then only accept contributions which are acceptable under that license. People will still break the rules, but at least you've made an effort and are covered. > It is not CC0, because most of the info in OL is not owned by OL/IA. > Only a rights owner can assign a CC license. > > OL already pulls in descriptions from Wikipedia and sources them: > http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL29497A/Herman_Melville That was added by hand by user Winnie http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL29497A/Herman_Melville?m=history > I believe that this fulfills the "attribution - share alike" of Wikipedia. > I disagree because there is no requirement on downstream consumers that they also license that text under CC-BY-SA. If that were allowed you could do "license washing" by taking licensed text from Wikipedia, pouring it into Open Library and then taking the OL dump and claiming that there was no license attached. Either the entire database needs a single homogeneous license that humans can deal with or there needs to be machine readable licensing information attached to subsets of the data. The "we don't know what the license is and you'll need to figure it out on your own" is useless from the point of view of someone who wants to reuse the information. Tom > > kc > > On 2/12/13 11:16 AM, Tom Morris wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 1:58 AM, John Shutt <[email protected] > > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > > > > > I noticed that a lot of books on Open Library don't have > > descriptions, so I've started working on NondescriptBot > > <https://github.com/pemulis/nondescript-bot>, which would make it > > easy to pull book summaries from Wikipedia, reformat them, and add > > them to Open Library. I haven't written any code yet (except for the > > login, which was adapted from IdentifierBot > > <https://github.com/dmontalvo/IdentifierBot/blob/master/fastadder.py > >), > > but you can see the basic outline in the comments > > < > https://github.com/pemulis/nondescript-bot/blob/master/nondescriptbot.py>. > > > > Before I go any further, I want to see if anyone knows if this bot > > would be okay from a licensing standpoint. Wikipedia entries are > > licensed under CC-BY-SA > > < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License > >, > > which requires attribution, while Open Library content is supposed > > to be licensed under CC0 > > <https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>, which waives > > all rights. It's trivial to put a CC-BY-SA disclaimer at the bottom > > of a description, but I don't know if it's permitted to add content > > to OL that falls under that license. > > > > > > No, you can't use a copyrightable amount of text which is CC-BY-SA > > licensed on a CC0 site. Part of the license is that you need to enforce > > it for sub-licensees & reusers, which there's no way to do with a CC0 > work. > > > > You could paraphrase or reword the description, but that's clearly not a > > job for a bot. You could also extract a small enough amount of text > > that it would fall under "fair use" guidelines and then link back to > > Wikipedia for the full text. If nothing else, links to Wikipedia would > > be useful (provided that their reliable). > > > > Assuming this bot is allowed, it would be awesome to get advice and > > pull requests from other developers! I'm coming into this project > > with very limited knowledge of Python, so I'm sure there will be > > plenty of places where my code could be improved. > > > > > > I'm happy to help with Python as well as OpenLibrary or Wikipedia APIs. > > > > Tom > > >
_______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
