Wiki submission license, credits, and policy.

[Jamie Jones]

On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 12:15 +0000, Matthew East wrote:
> > > 
> > 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.

OK. I understand - any document originally created on the wiki need not
have have the attribution on it. Documents such as mine, that were not
originally created for the wiki, and have subsequently been inserted
into the wiki, are derivative and that clause does indeed apply.

Is that a correct interpretation ?

> > 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.

Unless of course, you are the copyright holder - as I am.

> > > 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.

I'm afraid that is a misunderstanding, I am happy to contribute to the
wiki - I am merely seeking the upfront clarification of the terms and
conditions of contributing. I see it like this, why sign a contract that
you can't read first ? The documentation that I contribute (so far), I
didn't write just for the Ubuntu wiki, but even if I had, I would have
still asked the same question. I would rather avoid having a split in
the location of documentation, as I don't think it is in the users bests
interests.

To the best of my knowledge, under my local law, unless I assign the
copyright to someone else, I retain that copyright. Now you have stated
here that the wiki documentation is to be considered public domain, yet
it is not stated on the wiki (that I could find). If that is the
ubuntu-doc policy, and it is noted in a somewhat prominent place on the
wiki, I'm happy to continue contributing, with docs written especially
for the wiki not needing attribution.

For documentation that was not written especially for the Ubuntu wiki,
that I am the copyright holder of - please advise the terms and
conditions of acceptance.

I'm glad that my emails have prompted the general consensus of the
intent behind the wiki to be made more clear.

Regards
Jamie
-- 
GPG/PGP signed mail preferred. No HTML mail. No MS Word attachments
PGP Key ID 0x4B6E7209
Fingerprint E1FD 9D7E 6BB4 1BD4 AEB9 3091 0027 CEFA 4B6E 7209
-------------- 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/20051112/c5a08d60/attachment.pgp>