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Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

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Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#51

Post by dllthomas »

mikeash wrote: post #47
dllthomas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think people are using words sloppily. I think everyone agrees that the information should be available. I'm growing confident no one thinks that every contribution needs to be enumerated in situ, and beginning to suspect that no one thinks they actually need to be enumerated separately from the Wikipedia article (unless there are contributions not represented in the Wikipedia history). At which point, I don't think there's any real disagreement here.

I had interpreted your statement above as "Oh, of course go ahead and include a link to Wikipedia - they deserve credit too - but still redundantly list out every contributor to the Wikipedia page". This is because above, I think with the "...am I expected to cite every contributor? That doesn't seem reasonable." the author had in mind enumeration, not simple reference.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#52

Post by fredup »

In trying to "fix" this problem have TVT potentially made themselves liable for all the content posted there? They now assert "ownership" of all the content. In order to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act courts have held that they must not be "information content providers"[1], but TVT asserts full rights over all the content, including relicensing and use without attribution.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#53

Post by tjr »

bunderbunder wrote: post #23
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…

In programming, when you reuse others' work product it's considered good engineering practice. We call it "not reinventing the wheel." In most professions where the work product is in a natural language, reusing significant portions of others' work is called "plagiarism", and is considered a serious ethical violation. Reusing small portions for the sake of making a point, on the other hand, is covered by fair use rul…

I wonder if it would make sense to sell reusable chunks of text, like libraries of code.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#54

Post by TuringTest »

mikeash wrote: post #44
acheron wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

(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.)

Except if you happen to use something under an Affero GPL license, in which case you really should know about it.

But yes, those project are rare.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#55

Post by mikeash »

dllthomas wrote: post #51
mikeash wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think people are using words sloppily. I think everyone agrees that the information should be available. I'm growing confident no one thinks that every contribution needs to be enumerated in situ, and beginning to suspect that no one thinks they actually need to be enumerated separately from the Wikipedia article (unless there are contributions not represented in the Wikipedia history). At which point, I don't thin…

I'm just saying that you should give attribution either directly or in whatever substitute way the authors accept. If Wikipedia lets you just link to the page, great! If they wanted you to list out the contributors, well, do that. If that's an unacceptable burden for your case, don't use it.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#56

Post by TuringTest »

aliakbarkhan wrote: post #31
malnourish wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand? What happened with the censorship? As a casual, occasional browser I don't know where to start looking.

I would appreciate some more detail, too. I've noticed that I find TVT much less engrossing than I did a few years ago, but I thought I'd just grown out of it. If there's an explanation for the decline I would be very interested to hear it. edit: How accurate is the Encyclopedia Dramatica article on TVT? I normally avoid ED, but I gave in this time because it seems to be pretty comprehensive. edit 2: I found this blo…

I made the same questions when I discovered All The Tropes, these are the most relevant links I found:

* The Google Incident [1] explains first-hand why TV Tropes adopted tighter guidelines against sexual fan fiction, from which several forks were created as reaction.

* The fork All The Tropes explains how they are different[2], and why they made the fork [3].

* This recent discussion at MetaFilter have lots of details and reaction from the community [4].

* These are the most juicy discussions at TV Tropes itself: [5] [6]

--

[1] https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/The_Google_Incident

[2] https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/All_The_Tropes:Who_we_ar...

[3] https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/All_The_Tropes:Why_Fork_...

[4] http://www.metafilter.com/138391/You-are-in-yet-another-maze...

[5] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13850739750A...

[6] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13426240890A...

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#57

Post by labster »

smackfu wrote: post #3

This is 6 months old, so it doesn't seem like it went anywhere. Probably because the greater internet has no motivation to oppose moving content to a non-commercial license.

Original author here: You're right. It hasn't gone anywhere in 6 months, because there's no real angle on getting involved in a legal dispute. There's no money to be gained in suing TVT. And forcing them to take content offline hurts the commons perhaps more than it helps it.

The motivation behind the original blog was at least partially catharsis -- there really are no good options for copyright enforcement of open content. Sure, if it was a few lousy pages, TV Tropes could stand to lose them, but I'm talking about core pages like "Anime" and several tropes of legend initially written by my colleague.

Sure I could send a DCMA request, but they'd have every reason to fight it, and what then? Hire lawyers? Try to delete content that people thought was legal and amended, but actually turned into infringing content? Get them to delete pages on works of fiction of which I am a fan?

All of the options are awful except one: getting people to leave that illegal and immoral site. True morality isn't about protecting children's delicate eyes from textual metapornography, it's about giving back to the people who give to you -- and not just taking more from them.

I recommend either All The Tropes or the Tropes Mirror Wiki on Wikia.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#58

Post by TuringTest »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #22
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…

No. The text below the edit page reads: > TV Tropes by TV Tropes Foundation, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Donation of text is irrevocable and appreciated. While not explicit, this implies that the editor should make it sure that the contributed text can be le…

That text was added in November 2013, way after the re-licensing took place. The first nine years of contributions to the wiki didn't include such provision.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#59

Post by dllthomas »

mikeash wrote: post #55
dllthomas wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are using words sloppily. I think everyone agrees that the information should be available. I'm growing confident no one thinks that every contribution needs to be enumerated in situ, and beginning to suspect that no one thinks they actually need to be enumerated separately from the Wikipedia article (unless there are contributions not represented in the Wikipedia history). At which point, I don't thin…

I'm just saying that you should give attribution either directly or in whatever substitute way the authors accept. If Wikipedia lets you just link to the page, great! If they wanted you to list out the contributors, well, do that. If that's an unacceptable burden for your case, don't use it.

I think I agree with that, though I'd personally encourage creators to be sufficiently liberal in acceptance of substitutes to allow lightweight use of massive collaboration.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#60

Post by mikeash »

TuringTest wrote: post #54
mikeash wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

(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.) Except if you happen to use something under an Affero GPL license, in which case you really should know about it. But yes, those project are rare.

I hadn't heard of that one. Is it actually enforceable? I was under the impression that the GPL didn't require opening server code, not because it was missing something, but because server code doesn't get distributed and thus doesn't fall under copyright limitations in the first place.
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