Seeing as there is some ambiguity around licensing, and a decent amount of CC-BY-SA content on Open Library right now, should I just continue with my project for the time being? I'm only planning to take the first paragraphs of Wikipedia articles, not whole pages, and I would add the appropriate linkback and license information underneath.
I can see the advantages of releasing all data under CC0, but it would be a shame to leave out the enormous wealth of content available under other open licenses. The license terms would be clear to anyone who wanted to use the descriptions, since the disclaimer would always be included at the end, and if Open Library wanted to make the licenses machine-readable later on, it would be easy to find all of the edits made by my bot. Also keep in mind that if someone wants to write a description that's * better* than the Wikipedia summary, that could be licensed under CC0. The Wikipedia summaries would only be added where nobody has written a description yet. John On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Ben Companjen <[email protected]>wrote: > 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 >>> > >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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] >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > 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] > >
_______________________________________________ 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]
