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Re: migration of wiki material: suggested licence and legal issues



On Sun, 02 Oct 2005, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On the other hand (but note that this does not in any way rely on
> "Fair Use"), the old wiki maintainers have permission to publish the
> material. If the new wiki is set up by the same people (or
> organization), they can claim to exercise that right, simply on a
> different wiki. Is the old wiki an official Debian wiki, as the new
> one is?

No, but presumably we have the permision of the old wiki maintainers
to migrate the wiki to the new "official" wiki; there sure appears to
be an implied license to make the material available for distribution
to the public at least.

> that material cannot currently be (re)published in a DFSG-free
> manner. Copyright holders must be contacted and asked for permission
> to do that...

Yes, there's no argument about that aspect of it.

> If that allow public users to get the source form of the wiki
> content through the same medium (http) they use for accessing the
> wiki itself, that's fine.

No, it would be through a different medium, rsync; but they'd have
access to the content which is the critical aspect here.

> I was going for an easier approach (most users are annoyed by legal
> details), but your proposal is fine too, as long as this feature is
> simply enough to implement...

It's as simple as saying on a user's home page: "All content copyright
by me in this wiki not otherwise explicitely licensed is made
available under Foo license ... yada yada yada"

> > At some future date, we can go back through and identify pages
> > which haven't been correctly tagged by their contributors and
> > either remove them or reimplement them as the case may be.
> 
> That's the way to set up a wiki that will be forever encumbered with
> non-free parts.

I think you missed the section where I suggested "removal of
incorrectly licensed material at some future date"

> If people are not willing to do the tedious work *now*, what makes
> you think they will be willing to do it *in the future*?

Because the method you are suggesting is far more cumbersome than
allowing people to identify their own content and indicate the license
that it should be placed under? 

We're in the process of migrating the wiki content now. How long to
you expect it will take you to identify all of the copyright holders
for each of the couple thousand pages in the wiki and process the
messages from the copyright holders? [Have you even started?]

> People will try and get some old material relicensed *only* if that
> is a condition for the material to be allowed in.

Or if it is a condition for the material to remain in past a certain
date, which is what I am arguing for.


Don Armstrong

-- 
I'd never hurt another living thing.
But if I did...
It would be you.
 -- Chris Bishop  http://www.chrisbishop.com/her/archives/her69.html

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu

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