I totally agree with Tom here.

I have always believed OL data was released under CC0 (and I hope it will
(continue to) be), mostly because of the message in the edit form.
Theoretically me agreeing to share info with OL under CC0 doesn't mean that
OL must/will share it as CC0 again, but it is the most prominent licencing
agreement. Let's be clear about it, soon.

I confess that I too have taken a bit of Wikipedia and put in an author
profile (with attribution) - I didn't copy a whole page, but I don't know
if I can call it "fair use" either.

Ben


On 12 February 2013 21:07, Tom Morris <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
>> >
>>
>
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