Re: [Foundation-l] Terms of use : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 10:54 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: I suppose we could add a disclaimer saying that the Terms of Use do not affect the editor's moral rights, although this would be a bit redundant since the CC-BY-SA license already states this. It may be redundant in the legal text, but it would be extremely useful in the human readable version. (By this I do not exclude lawyers from the class of humans; but merely imply that the humans are a more inclusive class.) -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Terms of use : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans
On 12 December 2011 20:54, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: I suppose we could add a disclaimer saying that the Terms of Use do not affect the editor's moral rights, although this would be a bit redundant since the CC-BY-SA license already states this. Ryan Kaldari The problem is that the intent is to trash the editor's moral rights. In fact that term would be a particular problem in the UK where it is just about possible that you might be able to give up your moral rights via click through so the inclusion of such a term would rather spoil the intent. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Terms of use : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans
On 12 December 2011 20:22, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 December 2011 20:05, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote: We switched to the current license terms because we realised requiring re-users to credit every single person that made a non-trivial edit to the page was impractical and hardly any re-users were actually doing that. Actually it is extremely unclear why we switched. There are in fact a number of re-users that managed to deal with the attribution issue in paper form. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 9:52 PM, David Richfield davidrichfi...@gmail.com wrote: What effect would a less aggressive tone have had? Would you have been more likely to convince your audience? less likely to alienate people? It's a fair point. I think part of the problem is that people are feeling that reasonable, calm, friendly inquiries are likely to be ignored and making noise is necessary to get attention. I want to make sure we do our best to respond to reasonable inquiries in a timely manner, and would ask all WMF staff and contractors to help me in that regard. In general, if you feel that an engineering issue merits escalation, never hesitate to email me directly and, unless I'm totally swamped, I'll try to help. There are other folks whose job it is to help with triaging, like Mark Hershberger (mah at wikimedia dot org) and Sumana Harihareswara (sumanah at wikimedia dot org, especially for things like patch review), and of course you can also contact any of the engineering directors for tech issues, raise them on IRC, on Bugzilla, etc. It's true that sometimes people complaining loudly helps us to take an issue more seriously, but ideally that shouldn't be necessary and our processes should work to understand what's causing pain and what isn't. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] The Signpost -- Volume 7, Issue 50 -- 12 December 2011
Opinion essay: Wikipedia in Academe â and ''vice versa'' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/Opinion_essay News and notes: Research project banner ads run afoul of community http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/News_and_notes In the news: Bell Pottinger investigation, Gardner on gender gap, and another plagiarist caught red-handed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/In_the_news WikiProject report: Spanning Nine Time Zones with WikiProject Russia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/WikiProject_report Featured content: Wehwalt gives his fifty cents; spies, ambushes, sieges, and ''Entombment'' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/Featured_content Arbitration report: Betacommand 3 workshop revived, two cases set for acceptance and the ArbCom elections finish on a whimper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/Arbitration_report Technology report: Trials and tribulations of image rotation, Article Feedback version 5, and new diff colours http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/Technology_report Single page view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signpost/Single PDF version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12 http://identi.ca/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The next Wikimedia architecture
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 05:57:02AM +, Randall Britten wrote: One more vote from me for a collaborative Wikipedia hosting: In order to future proof Wikimedia, an even more distributed architecture is needed. This would allow another way to contribute to the Wikimedia effort: the donation of technical resources. This idea is by no means a new idea, see for example http://www.globule.org/publi/DWECWH_webist2007.html and http://www.globule.org/?page_id=72 List here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals sincerely, Kim Bruning -- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Terms of use : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans
On 12/13/11 9:02 AM, geni wrote: Actually it is extremely unclear why we switched. There are in fact a number of re-users that managed to deal with the attribution issue in paper form. It can often be done on paper (and easily on the web), but it's not very convenient for audio, i.e. spoken wikipedia articles. In the days of the GFDL you not only had to recite the entire list of contributors, but also the full text of the GFDL! Our primary goal should be to spread knowledge, not to ensure that we are prominently credited as individuals. Proper attribution is important, but it shouldn't be a higher priority than making our content easy to reuse and disseminate in a wide variety of mediums. Using a URL allows attribution without creating a hardship for the reuser. This has the added benefit of allowing us to enforce our terms firmly and consistantly, rather than carving out exceptions for various cases and having inconsistencies between what we require on paper and what we actually expect from reusers. Ryan Kaldari ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Terms of use : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 9:46 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: [...] Using a URL allows attribution without creating a hardship for the reuser. This has the added benefit of allowing us to enforce our terms firmly and consistantly, rather than carving out exceptions for various cases and having inconsistencies between what we require on paper and what we actually expect from reusers. Using an URL does allow the semblance of attribution, but does not fulfil the legal requirements of moral rights. I find it mildly distasteful, that other jurisdictions laws are referred to as exceptions for various cases, when CC itself has committed itself to better internationalisation in its 4.0 version. Would also like a bit of clarity on what precisely is the difference between: what we require on paper and what we actually expect from reusers. ... and how those differ from what we actually advise people to do when they reuse content... ? -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Terms of use : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans
Not really, in the UK at least. However this is a poor example; it's important to note that UK moral rights legislation isn't *actually*representative. we fail to comply with the Berne Convention on attribution, insofar as we don't mandate it except when the author makes clear he wants it. It's also possible that our moral rights law doesn't actually apply to Wikipedia, since it makes clear (see section 79(6) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988) that there isn't a right to attribution for works published as part of an encyclopedia. Whoops ;). On 13 December 2011 21:37, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 12/13/11 12:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Using an URL does allow the semblance of attribution, but does not fulfil the legal requirements of moral rights. I find it mildly distasteful, that other jurisdictions laws are referred to as exceptions for various cases, when CC itself has committed itself to better internationalisation in its 4.0 version. Actually, I was suggesting the opposite: that in many cases (in the GFDL days) we carved out exceptions (unofficially) to allow people to reuse our content without meeting the full requirements of the license (much less the moral rights requirements). If you've ever taken a look at... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GFDL_Compliance and its associated talk page, you'll see that the en.wiki community at least treated license compliance as a fairly gray issue, i.e. there was some degree of allowance for trying to comply rather than actually complying, due to the fact that few reusers were willing to list all the contributors (even on websites, where space is cheap). I have no idea if the same was true for the position of the Foundation's legal department, but I suspect it was. (I'm just guessing though.) It looks like the main areas where URL attribution would be an issue are Commonwealth countries. In the rest of the world, moral rights are either non-existent, or not waivable. Is there any Commonwealth caselaw on what types of attribution are acceptable for satisfying moral rights? Ryan Kaldari ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Oliver Keyes Community Liason, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On 13/12/11 02:55, David Gerard wrote: On 12 December 2011 15:26, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote: It's been a requested feature for a while, Someone finally got around to writing it (I believe it needed the Improved metadata handling backend first) and implementing it, It wasn't a sudden oh lets write this and enable it in one day thing, a lot of work went into it and subsequent testing. * How many existing uploads, used on the wikis, were previously wrongly rotated and were fixed by the feature? * How many existing uploads, used on the wikis, were previously correctly rotated and were messed up by the feature? i.e., was there strong reason to apply it to past images, not just new ones? Such statistics were never gathered. I was told by the developers involved that existing images with EXIF rotation would be very rare and that most of them would be fixed by this feature, and I didn't challenge that. I think it's too early to focus on recriminations, we risk distracting people from actually fixing the issue. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Terms of use : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 12/13/11 12:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Using an URL does allow the semblance of attribution, but does not fulfil the legal requirements of moral rights. I find it mildly distasteful, that other jurisdictions laws are referred to as exceptions for various cases, when CC itself has committed itself to better internationalisation in its 4.0 version. Actually, I was suggesting the opposite: that in many cases (in the GFDL days) we carved out exceptions (unofficially) to allow people to reuse our content without meeting the full requirements of the license (much less the moral rights requirements). If it is unofficial, it sounds a bit grandiose to term the action as carving out. English language usage would be to use the phrase turn a blind eye. And if as you previously claimed, the moral rights requirements are implicit in the full licence requirements, why would you argue that stating them in the TOS is redundant, but now seem to imply that the moral rights are more stringent than the licence. Either moral rights are contained in the licence, or not. I really hope 4.0 brings clarity, and also that WMF will go forward from an unported licence to a fully internationalized TOS implementation, the sooner the better. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Visual Editor Prototype
For those who've not seen the announcement, the WMF tech team have launched the first prototype of the visual editor, perhaps the most challenging technical project ever undertaken in the history of MediaWiki development.: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/help-test-the-first-visual-editor-developer-prototype/Congratulations to everyone who's been working on this so far - more power to you! The Economist has already picked this up and called it the most significant change in Wikipedia’s short history. http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/12/changes-wikipedia You can play with the new system in the sandbox here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox As mentioned in the announcement, it's by no-means fully featured (doesn't yet allow editing of templates/tables, saving edits etc.) and they're looking to June 2012 for first production use at scale. Feedback left via that sandbox gets published on MediaWiki.org here http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor/Feedback [Sorry if this was already announced on this list! It's just such significant and unambiguously good news that I wanted to shout it from the rooftops.] -Liam Peace, love metadata ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Visual Editor Prototype
The first link to the blog is not working. Here's one that works: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/help-test-the-first-visual-editor-developer-prototype/ //Abbas. From: liamwy...@gmail.com Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:34:56 + To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Foundation-l] Visual Editor Prototype For those who've not seen the announcement, the WMF tech team have launched the first prototype of the visual editor, perhaps the most challenging technical project ever undertaken in the history of MediaWiki development.: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/help-test-the-first-visual-editor-developer-prototype/Congratulations to everyone who's been working on this so far - more power to you! The Economist has already picked this up and called it the most significant change in Wikipedia’s short history. http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/12/changes-wikipedia You can play with the new system in the sandbox here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox As mentioned in the announcement, it's by no-means fully featured (doesn't yet allow editing of templates/tables, saving edits etc.) and they're looking to June 2012 for first production use at scale. Feedback left via that sandbox gets published on MediaWiki.org here http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor/Feedback [Sorry if this was already announced on this list! It's just such significant and unambiguously good news that I wanted to shout it from the rooftops.] -Liam Peace, love metadata ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Terms of use : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans
Sorry about the confusion. I was talking most recently about the GFDL, which does not mention moral rights. CC-BY-SA does mention moral rights (to state that it does not affect them). Interestingly, the U.S. port of the CC-BY-SA license does not include a disclaimer about moral rights, but this is irrelevant since the WMF uses the unported license, not the U.S. version. The unported license is designed to be legally useful in as many countries as possible, and during the 4.0 draft process they are hoping to improve this aspect of the license. From everything I've heard, Creative Commons is hoping to move away from ported licenses, as these have been a major headache for everyone, especially in regards to license compatibility. The idea to have numerous localized Terms of Use for Wikipedia (based on the laws of each country) is an interesting idea. It would probably be a nightmare to maintain, but we've managed worse. I would love to hear Geoff's thoughts on this. Getting back to your original point, I suppose it's true that the Terms of Service could affect the protection of moral rights (in certain countries), even if the license explicitly doesn't. However, after doing more research into this, it looks like it's a moot issue. Moral rights (per Common law) are for the protection of literary and artistic works, not factual reference works. Works like encyclopedias, dictionaries, newspaper articles, etc. are not covered by moral rights. I imagine the reasoning behind this is that such works entail a minimum degree of creative authorship and are often published without attribution. If I'm mistaken in this conclusion, please let me know. Ryan Kaldari On 12/13/11 7:56 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Ryan Kaldarirkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 12/13/11 12:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Using an URL does allow the semblance of attribution, but does not fulfil the legal requirements of moral rights. I find it mildly distasteful, that other jurisdictions laws are referred to as exceptions for various cases, when CC itself has committed itself to better internationalisation in its 4.0 version. Actually, I was suggesting the opposite: that in many cases (in the GFDL days) we carved out exceptions (unofficially) to allow people to reuse our content without meeting the full requirements of the license (much less the moral rights requirements). If it is unofficial, it sounds a bit grandiose to term the action as carving out. English language usage would be to use the phrase turn a blind eye. And if as you previously claimed, the moral rights requirements are implicit in the full licence requirements, why would you argue that stating them in the TOS is redundant, but now seem to imply that the moral rights are more stringent than the licence. Either moral rights are contained in the licence, or not. I really hope 4.0 brings clarity, and also that WMF will go forward from an unported licence to a fully internationalized TOS implementation, the sooner the better. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] How SOPA will hurt the free web and Wikipedia
Today the Wikimedia Foundation posted an important update on how the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation being considered in DC this week threatens an open and free web, and particularly how it threatens Wikipedia. The post is authored by WMF's General Counsel, Geoff Brigham, and can be found here: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/how-sopa-will-hurt-the-free-web-and-wikipedia/ We encourage everyone to broadly share this information among our volunteer community, throughout your networks, and wherever an audience passionate about protecting the free and open web can be found. Thanks, -- Jay Walsh Head of Communications WikimediaFoundation.org blog.wikimedia.org +1 (415) 839 6885 x 6609, @jansonw ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How SOPA will hurt the free web and Wikipedia
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Jay Walsh jwa...@wikimedia.org wrote: Today the Wikimedia Foundation posted an important update on how the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation being considered in DC this week threatens an open and free web, and particularly how it threatens Wikipedia. The post is authored by WMF's General Counsel, Geoff Brigham, and can be found here: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/how-sopa-will-hurt-the-free-web-and-wikipedia/ Under the new bill, there is one significant improvement. The new version exempts U.S. based companies – including the Wikimedia Foundation – from being subject to a litigation regime in which rights owners could claim that our site was an “Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” Such a damnation against Wikimedia could have easily resulted in demands to cut off our fundraising payment processors. The new version now exempts U.S. sites like ours. I am genuinely not anti-american. The logic here does escape me though. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
