| Psychoslave added a comment. |
In T193728#4200647, @Tgr wrote:Do editors have rights over infobox data? Individual facts are not copyrightable; collections of infobox data could maybe be copyrighted if they were curated by an organization with a legal personality, or a well-defined group of authors, but that is not the case. "The Wikimedia community" is not a legal entity that could hold copyright or neighboring rights. Community curation seems to me like a legal black hole, a bit like the monkey selfie: there is an activity that is clearly protected by IP rights, but there is no one to assign those rights to, so in the end the work/data does end up in the public domain.
That's different from copying, say, map data from Google, in which case there is a well-defined legal entity which might or might not have sui generis database rights which Wikidata might or might not want to respect.
Well, it seems very complicated legal point, involving notions such as collective work, factual association, and voluntary association, and maybe other legal considerations I'm not even aware of.
But even beyond the legality concern, it would be interesting to know if there is any consensus among Wikipedia contributors regarding this derivative work which weaver the license terms under which they consented to contribute. The legal aspect is of course important, but the feeling that Wikimedia matches its displayed social values to be welcoming hosts, caring neighbors, and equitable allies should not be neglected.
As stated on the Wikidata talk page, it might also be putted into perspective with How Does Feist Protect Electronic Data Bases of Facts? which concludes the selection theory grants copyright protection in a factual compilation based on originality in the compiler's selection. In framing this standard, the Court reiterated the low threshold of originality required to invoke copyright protection.
Regarding copyright ownership and ability to claim infringement, it really applies to the specific case of Wikipedia and similar cases of "collective work" without any delegation to any central authority.
For Wikimedia project it raises the question should we change terms of use of Wikimedia services to grant the WMF rights to defend Wikimedia community copyrights in court (which could be delegated to recognized affiliates)?
For all data banks, whether they have a well identified single moral person holding the copyright or not, a clear statement should be decided anyway on what should or should not be imported from them. This decision should preferably depend on each source terms of use, licenses, or other legally reliable and identifiable considerations.
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