| Psychoslave added a comment. |
In T193728#4202938, @Simon_Villeneuve wrote:I think that Jarekt has expressed the position of most of the Wikidata contributors : facts can't be copyrighted.
So far it doesn't seem that anyone have disagreed with that: a single fact can't be copyrighted.
However data collection are possibly copyrightable, even if this data collection solely consist of facts. Taking only in consideration US law, where WMF servers are hosted, see Copyright Protection for Purely Factual Compilations Under Feist Publications, Inc. vs Rural Telephone Service Co.: How Does Feist Protect Electronic Data Bases of Facts? which concludes, inter alie, 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.
But if Wikidata aims at being useful outside USA, it should of course ensure that downstream user can rely the license under which it is claimed to be published for their specific legislation. It doesn't mean that everything in Wikidata should be legally publishable under CC-0 everywhere, but it should be legal to do it at least in the USA. And it would be only really useful without legal uncertainty outside USA if it was providing a way to ascertain whether a data subset derived of Wikidata can be legally used in a given different legal context and under which license conditions.
Current state of Wikidata conduct projects like OSM to put in their policy that, in general, imports of data from Wikidata are not accepted due to the sources often used to contribute to Wikidata. This is a real concrete case of what the current legal uncertainty of Wikidata conduct to. Potential downstream users won't use it because of its low standards in terms of copyright. That doesn't seems to match our stated value of striving for excellence.
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