| Cirdan added a comment. |
In T193728#4221843, @Micru wrote:Wikipedias rephrase the content of works under copyright and rebrand that content as CC-BY-SA, which label do you put to that practice?
That is not what Wikipedia is doing. Wikipedia is using information collected by third parties to create encyclopedic articles. If done properly, i.e. most notably not by directly copying texts, this is not a copyright issue, because facts cannot be copyrighted.
More generally, however, rephrasing is not sufficient. If I write an original book and you publish a rephrased version of that book, there is still a copyright issue there, because I hold the rights to the story and the precise way it is told. This is why a Wikipedia article as a whole can be copyright protected even though the information contained therein is not. There are certainly small Wikipedia articles which are just a collection of facts and can likely be considered without copyright protection because they do not reach the threshold required for an original work (at least under German jurisdiction that is the case), but longer articles where information had to be carefully selected and weighted are original works.
In which way is it different from doing the same with any content and rebranding it as CC0?
Take the example of the book I wrote again: While individual sentences and bits of information are not protected, the way a collection of facts is organized can be protected. This is why in certain jurisdictions data collections and databases have been or currently are subject to copyright laws, which in turn is why we are having this discussion here.
The very strict policy of OSM (see e.g. here) is a good example to understand this problem.
If there are cases where copyright law permits the extraction of information from copyrighted texts, then this applies to CC-BY-SA licensed texts as well, so there is no need to change CC-BY-SA to extract information from Wikipedia.
That would be ideal.
This task is about figuring out what is allowed and what is not, and the questions agreed on will hopefully shed some light onto this issue.
It's not a "clarification", it would constitute a retroactive conversion of CC-BY-SA into a license which is effectively CC-0. As we have explained to you multiple times now, that is not possible without consent of every single contributor of a copyright protected text to Wikipedia and it is highly doubtful that a majority of Wikipedians (or the WMF) is interested in converting Wikipedia to CC-0.
Well, you just said that that there might be cases "where copyright law permits the extraction of information from copyrighted texts", so I believe that an explicit indication about those cases in the CC-BY-SA license could be helpful for other people to avoid repeating this conversation in other places.
CC licences are built within the framework of current copyright law. It is not necessary and in fact would probably be quite problematic to add terms to the license which simply reiterate parts of the law in a different wording.
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