Wikisource talk:Copyright policy

Highlights of Copyright Amendments Contained in the URAA‎

As reading material Author:US Copyright Office's Highlights of Copyright Amendments Contained in the URAA‎ is now available locally. -- billinghurst (talk) 15:26, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Revocability clauses

Does a license that is free in every other respect become incompatible with Wikisource if it is revocable? I'm unable to find anything definitive either way, at least here on Wikisource. The specific case I'm looking at is the Conservapedia license, which reads in part: "Conservapedia grants a non-exclusive license to you to use any of the content (other than images) on this site with or without attribution. … This license is revocable only in very rare instances of self-defense, such as protecting continued use by Conservapedia editors or other licensees or stopping unauthorized copying or mirroring of entire parts of this site" (emphasis mine), and "Conservapedia may clarify and amend its copyright [sic] from time to time by updating this document here." --LarryGilbert (talk) 18:03, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

No; none of the other freedoms are meaningful if the license is revocable.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:42, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

What, then, do we do with the fact that every copyright license is revocable during a defined period under Sections 203(a) and 304(c)? There is no such thing as an irrevocable license under United States copyright law; sections 203(a)(5) and 304(c)(5) make very clear that a licensor’s agreement not to revoke a license is void. If the possibility of future revocation makes a license un-“free,” then there is no such thing as a free license. Tarmstro99 (talk) 19:37, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

I think that's an exaggeration. Yes, if a licensor made the claim that "this license cannot be terminated, not even within the five-year window permitted by law," that would be unenforceable and void. Still, I think there's a big difference between a termination window set in stone by federal law and a termination window of "whenever I feel like it." (In fairness, though, you've highlighted an interesting fact—I did not know about that five-year window provided by law.) —LarryGilbert (talk) 00:18, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I certainly agree that it’s not necessary (or appropriate) to follow the argument to the point of reductio ad absurdum; my only point was that the definition of what we consider to be “free content” can’t depend on the possibility of future revocation of the rights granted under the license, because that criterion does not usefully differentiate a class of licenses that can be revoked from a class of licenses that cannot be: by statute, they can all be revoked. Perhaps our copyright policy ought to be something like: a license that reserves to the licensor broader powers to terminate or revoke the license than are mandated by federal law is not compatible with the “free content” definition. If we draw the line there, then the Conservapedia license is out, but licenses that are silent on the issue of revocation would be OK.

(Drawing the line there raises a separate problem, namely, what do you do with the so-called “termination clauses” that actually appear in licenses that Wikisource recognizes as “free-content” compatible, such as the Section 9 of the GFDL 1.3, or Section 7(a) of the 3.0-series Creative Commons licenses? I think those are best understood as forfeiture clauses, not termination, even though the latter is how they are labeled; that is, they tell users “if you fail to comply with the conditions stated in the license, you forfeit your authorization to exercise the rights granted in the license (for example, to copy or make derivative works)”; they do not tell users, “the licensor reserves the power to rescind your authorization irrespective of whether you have breached the terms of the license.” In other words, the licenses say “termination,” but they don’t really mean it, at least not in the way that federal copyright law defines what it means for a license to be “terminated.” I have a paper coming out in the summer that develops this point a little further; lots of licenses both in and outside the open-source world use key terms in ways that vary from how those terms are understood under copyright law, which makes it more difficult to make confident predictions about how those licenses would be interpreted in court.)

The point is, ultimately, that copyright licensing is really tricky stuff; lots of complexity lurks just below the surface even when the question presented seems to be a simple one. To the extent that we’re trying to provide clear guidance about which content to include and exclude here, it might be easier to do so through WS:WWI than through parsing the terms of other sites’ licenses alone. Licensing issues are likely to be of interest to the powers that be at WMF, too, in view of the liability implications of getting it “wrong” at WS. Tarmstro99 (talk) 15:03, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Excellent observations. And I'll be very interested to read that paper. —LarryGilbert (talk) 19:29, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Need to update WS:COPY

The above needs to be revised. This policy statement contains advice that is not current WikiSource policy. In particular, it says the following:

[For copyright purposes etc.] “[i]t is the responsibility of the contributor to assert compatibility with Wikisource's license.”

Although I think the above should be the WikiSource policy in all cases – I am in a minority of one and it has emerged a discussion on the copyright discussion page (on that page see:#On who is the onus to establish the copyright position?) that this is not the case. Two standards apply: One standard for new works (where this principle is applied) and another standard for works that have been hosted here for some time (how long etc is unclear). Please could I ask the Administrators especially to take the lead in updating WS:COPY so the position is 100% clear. Thanks. Formosa (talk) 13:40, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Transcriptions

Are modern transcriptions of public domain works in the public domain, or are they protected by copyright? 76.232.75.134 21:34, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

A simple copy or transcription of a public domain work is not enough to give the copier or transcriber a new copyright.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:28, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

What about cases where the transcription demands competent analysis? Say, an ancient cuneiform text is in the public domain, but transcribing it into Latin characters isn't a trivial task and requires training and some interpretative work, so different scholars could do it in different ways. A less extreme example would be transcribing John Eliot's Wampanoag/Massachusett bible from the original colonial spelling into the standardised modern spelling, which requires some knowledge of the language and/or of other Algonquian languages. Or transcribing an Old Norse manuscript with all its variations and peculiarities in spelling into the standardised form of Old Norse. Even writing down an individual version of a folk legend still requires some editing work if it isn't a simple transcript of speech. A somewhat similar situation is found in the case of a version of a folk legend or a medieval text that an editor has produced by comparing different recorded versions of the legend or different medieval manuscripts - that requires even more original editing work.--95.42.19.211 21:47, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Edit request

{{editprotected}} Hello! Two requests. First, please change

[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License] (CC-BY-SA 3.0) and the [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html GNU Free Documentation License], Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.

to

[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License] (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html GNU Free Documentation License], unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts.

per Foundation:Policy:Terms of Use#7. Licensing of Content. Additionally, please change

Original works including translations placed on Wikisource are automatically licensed under the CC-BY-SA unless explicitly licensed otherwise. With this license, the copyright holder retains copyright and can later republish and relicense the works in any way they like. However, the work will be released under the CC-BY-SA forever.

Miscellaneous original content (such as on user or discussion pages) is also automatically released under the CC-BY-SA.

to

Original works including translations placed on Wikisource are automatically licensed under CC BY-SA unless explicitly licensed otherwise. With this license, the copyright holder retains copyright and can later republish and relicense the works in any way they like. However, the work will be released under a CC BY-SA license forever.

Miscellaneous original content (such as on user or discussion pages) is also automatically released under CC BY-SA and the GFDL.

per the Commons style guide (e.g. "CC BY-SA" instead of "CC-BY-SA"). Thanks! HouseBlaster (talk) 01:55, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

@HouseBlaster: Done. --Xover (talk) 06:56, 23 October 2023 (UTC)