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Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

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Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#41

Post by putlake »

zokier wrote: post #15
putlake wrote: post #10

I'm the founder of a wiki so I know some of these legal issues better than most (although, of course IANAL). Typically how this is supposed to work is: Wiki's terms of use say (1) Users own the copyright to their contributions (authors always do; TVTropes appropriating this is not right) (2)Users grant wiki a non-exclusive irrevocable license to do use the content in any way Wiki likes, including specifically a right…

> Wiki is legally within its rights to change the licensing of its content. Would be if they had proper terms of use/service in place. But TVtropes has no terms as far as I can see, which makes the situation whole lot muddier. Basically we are working on an implicit grant of rights to TVtropes from content authors. The disagreement stems on what those rights include.

No argument there. My post said "Typically how this is supposed to work". It doesn't mean TVTropes works like that.

Their current terms of use also have no bearing on their legal right to change the licensing from CC-BY-SA to CC-BY-NC-SA. That depends upon what terms of use they had in place before the conversion.

Their current terms are: if you contribute, we own (the copyright to) all your contributions. That's not only unfair to users, it may even be illegal because in a contract you have to provide some compensation in exchange for the release of copyright.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#42

Post by ronaldx »

eric_cc wrote: post #30
mikeash wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it speaks to a different mindset from what we as programmers are used to. Licensing is a pretty big deal for us. Virtually every programmer has some sort of opinion on GPL vs BSD vs public domain vs whatever. Open source projects can live or die because of their license. Wikis are basically open source projects with natural language instead of code. But I get the impression that few wiki contributors care tha…

I'm a programmer and at the risk of sounding like an idiot - I have no opinion on licensing and could not tell you a single thing about any one license. Are there really that many people knowledgable about different licenses?

If you intend to use your work commercially, you should be aware of licenses when you select what tools you are building on top of, or you may get bitten later.

You may also wish to license your own work for others to use. If you have an opinion about when others should be allowed to use your work, licensing can be important for you to achieve that.

You may not need to be aware if you have a legal department who do this for you, for example (or if you are willing to take the risk of legal action later).

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#43

Post by mikeash »

dllthomas wrote: post #28
mikeash wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is cheap, and you can stash the list away somewhere that doesn't interfere with the main content, so what does that matter?

What is the difference between stashing the list away somewhere out of sight and providing a link to the Wikipedia page whose history contains the same information? Particularly since storage is not cheap in every medium (e.g. requiring my one-page flier to attach 3 pages of attributions doesn't make sense) and if you're resorting to a link regardless...

I think linking to the Wikipedia page is perfectly reasonable too. I just don't see what's unreasonable about citing the people who wrote the stuff you're using.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#44

Post by mikeash »

acheron wrote: post #37
eric_cc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a programmer and at the risk of sounding like an idiot - I have no opinion on licensing and could not tell you a single thing about any one license. Are there really that many people knowledgable about different licenses?

Nah, you're not an idiot. There's a tendency on HN of people saying "all programmers" to mean "programmers who live in Silicon Valley, use open source tools to write web apps funded by ad eyeballs, and put all their code on Github". Witness the countless posts about "why should I interview when I can point to a Github account", or that article yesterday about "articles every programmer should read" that had something…

That's kind of funny, since I'm nowhere near Silicon Valley and don't even identify with that crowd, I rarely do any web work, and write plenty of proprietary code. (Ironically, web apps are an area where you can generally get away with not knowing anything about open source licenses, since you're not redistributing the programs you make.)

I merely observe that programmers generally use third party libraries, and that doing so requires at least a basic understanding of the license terms.

Maybe there are a lot of people out there writing code who never touch external code?

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#45

Post by phaemon »

eric_cc wrote: post #30
mikeash wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it speaks to a different mindset from what we as programmers are used to. Licensing is a pretty big deal for us. Virtually every programmer has some sort of opinion on GPL vs BSD vs public domain vs whatever. Open source projects can live or die because of their license. Wikis are basically open source projects with natural language instead of code. But I get the impression that few wiki contributors care tha…

I'm a programmer and at the risk of sounding like an idiot - I have no opinion on licensing and could not tell you a single thing about any one license. Are there really that many people knowledgable about different licenses?

The reason I care about licenses is because the auditors care about licenses and we can get hit with ginormously hefty fines if we're not in compliance.

So, I wouldn't say you're an idiot, but you're a bit dangerous to work with. Professional programmers should know about licensing.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#46

Post by dllthomas »

mikeash wrote: post #43
dllthomas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the difference between stashing the list away somewhere out of sight and providing a link to the Wikipedia page whose history contains the same information? Particularly since storage is not cheap in every medium (e.g. requiring my one-page flier to attach 3 pages of attributions doesn't make sense) and if you're resorting to a link regardless...

I think linking to the Wikipedia page is perfectly reasonable too. I just don't see what's un reasonable about citing the people who wrote the stuff you're using.

I don't see that the link to Wikipedia is not "citing the people who wrote the stuff you're using". When you cite a scientific paper, you give the primary author (or few) and an "et al.", you don't list out everyone who contributed to the paper - you're still crediting them all and if people care, they can go look up the rest.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#47

Post by mikeash »

dllthomas wrote: post #46
mikeash wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think linking to the Wikipedia page is perfectly reasonable too. I just don't see what's un reasonable about citing the people who wrote the stuff you're using.

I don't see that the link to Wikipedia is not "citing the people who wrote the stuff you're using". When you cite a scientific paper, you give the primary author (or few) and an "et al.", you don't list out everyone who contributed to the paper - you're still crediting them all and if people care, they can go look up the rest.

OK, I'm not really sure what the relevance of this is.

I was just responding to this: "...am I expected to cite every contributor? That doesn't seem reasonable."

And saying how it sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you say that a Wikipedia link counts as a cite then that just makes it even more reasonable.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#48

Post by hga »

wwwwwwwwww wrote: post #34
blueskin_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've had a couple of rounds of deleting anything that might be considered sexual, NSFW, or controversial reference or language, as well as renaming articles. This is to make the site more attractive for advertisers because the admins want moar moniez. It's also worse on tvtropes than most wikis because there is a very limited revision history on most pages (might be the weird software they use rather than admin-im…

I'm still mad about them going and removing all the monster girl quest articles during that spiel. That was pretty much the end of tvtropes for me.

Trying to learn about that game so I could understand a good fanfic was what alerted me to the problem, and not surprisingly the first fork of the site I looked at, back when it was announced on HN (can't find the link, unfortunately), the front page (Wikimedia) highlighted that title.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#49

Post by putlake »

drdaeman wrote: post #17
putlake wrote: post #10

I'm the founder of a wiki so I know some of these legal issues better than most (although, of course IANAL). Typically how this is supposed to work is: Wiki's terms of use say (1) Users own the copyright to their contributions (authors always do; TVTropes appropriating this is not right) (2)Users grant wiki a non-exclusive irrevocable license to do use the content in any way Wiki likes, including specifically a right…

For (2) you need users consent to that. That generally means, such provision must be reasonably visible and explained to user when he registers or starts editing. Linked post had shown the only thing user seems to consent before she could start editing to is that she's over 13 years old. Edit: Oh, also. Everyone, please don't downvote parent post. While one may well disagree with what it says, that post is certainly…

You are right that it's not enough to have ToS; the users should actively accept them. But what was plain wrong about my post? It said typically this is how it's supposed to work, in which the wiki has a right to change its licensing. Not that TVtropes ToS is like that or that what they did was right.

If the only provision of the ToS that you're accepting is that you are over 13, then the wiki has no rights to even distribute your content under CC-BY-SA. So the conversion to NC isn't even relevant.

And in any case, you own copyright to anything you author, unless you expressly transfer them to someone else in exchange for some sort of compensation. Absent that, the blogger of OP is fully able to release his work under any license he chooses. And he did that on his blog. So what's wrong?

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#50

Post by pessimizer »

eric_cc wrote: post #30
mikeash wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it speaks to a different mindset from what we as programmers are used to. Licensing is a pretty big deal for us. Virtually every programmer has some sort of opinion on GPL vs BSD vs public domain vs whatever. Open source projects can live or die because of their license. Wikis are basically open source projects with natural language instead of code. But I get the impression that few wiki contributors care tha…

I'm a programmer and at the risk of sounding like an idiot - I have no opinion on licensing and could not tell you a single thing about any one license. Are there really that many people knowledgable about different licenses?

If you use other people's code, you might want to take a glance at the agreement that you're entering into with the person who wrote it for you, because you're going to be held to it. Within FOSS we've pretty much standardized on a few general forms, with small differences. When you mix them, though, those small differences can become very important.

If you work with Microsoft, though, you may want to hire someone to figure licensing out for you. Figuring out Microsoft licensing seems to be a lot harder than programming.

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