Wiki submission license, credits, and policy.

Matthew East mdke at ubuntu.com
Fri Nov 11 12:15:03 UTC 2005


On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 15:33 +1100, Jamie Jones wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 19:08 +0000, Matthew East wrote:
> > First is that it's not necessary for the documents to have a record of
> > the authors on them at all. Licences deal with the way in which the
> > material subject to the licence (a wiki page in this case, or the whole
> > body of the documentation) can be reproduced, whether copied in its
> > entirety or modified. They do not generally impose any obligations on us
> > as authors and primary publishers of the work, whether to provide
> > details of authors or anything else.
> > 
> > There would only be a need for us to supply authors on the documents if
> > the licences stated that they did not apply AT ALL if the document did
> > not have author attribution on it. Neither of them say this.
> > 
> I must read Section 4 c of
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode differently to
> you.
> 
> Section 4c
> If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
> digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works,
> You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide,
> reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the
> Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied,
> 
> I believe the author credits are an assertion of copyright, and should
> be kept intact (if of course they are in the original document).

You are not reading it wrongly, you are misunderstanding what a licence
is. That section (and the rest of the licence too) simply refers to the
terms on which people can copy the material from the original document.
The wiki documents are original documents, not derivative works, as
defined by the licence itself.

> > Second, even if I'm wrong and the wiki somehow does not constitute an
> > original document, in any case it is only necessary to give attribution
> > which is "reasonable to the medium or means" used - in this case it is a
> > wiki, which implies by its very nature that every page is editable by
> > all and is the work of the wider community.
> > 
> > Third, if this is wrong, I still think the presence of the page history
> > would suggest that reasonable attribution is given. 
> > 
> > Fourth, again even if all the above are wrong, the nature of the wiki is
> > such that contributors can be taken to have waived any obligation on
> > people to attribute the work done.
> 
> How does this apply to documents that were copied into the wiki from a
> non-wiki source ? As is the case with my documentation.

This depends on what licence the non-wiki source is subject to. If there
is no licence there, you can't copy the material: it is copyrighted. It
doesn't depend on what licence the wiki is subject to.

> > Having said all of this I do think that there are one or two
> > improvements that we can make. First is to make it clearer what licences
> > actually apply on the wiki, perhaps by incorporating a link to the
> > licence on main pages such as FrontPage and UserDocumentation. Secondly,
> > I think we can also make it clearer that we are happy to waive the
> > requirement that authors are specifically attributed in any reproduction
> > of the document, whether copied or modified. In my opinion, this isn't
> > strictly necessary, for the reasons I've outlined, but it wouldn't hurt
> > to make this clear.
> 
> I do think it is necessary to be specific about this. Perhaps a
> copyright assignment similar to what the FSF uses might be useful, so
> that eg I have copyright on my document, when it is contributed to the
> wiki, I and Ubuntu both have copyright over the wiki version of the
> document.

I will work on something to clarify things. However the solution, as I
see it, is to find a solution that makes it clear that the wiki
documentation is licenced freely, rather than the authors maintaining
any copyright over the material. It would make sense to seek a licence
which requires people copying material from the wiki to attribute the
source in a PROPORTIONATE way, i.e. to give credit to the wiki in a way
which identifies the collaborative nature of the source.

From what you say, it sounds like you are unwilling to work on the wiki
without retaining some level of copyright over the work: this is not
what we should aim at, in my opinion, and it is not the current
situation either.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20051111/64af43fb/attachment.pgp>


More information about the ubuntu-doc mailing list