Publishing pieces done by other authors

[hans]

Much valuable media content is released under other license than Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike? 2.5. Wikimedia Commons and other open content databases have a lot of content that is released to Public Domain or under Free Documentation License.

We should enable several licenses for pieces:

• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike? 2.5
• Free Documentation License
• Public Domain

This means the following changes to Edit Piece page:

• Input field for entering the name of original author
• Select menu for selecting a license in additional information page for pieces. Only the person who has uploaded the piece and "moderators" (users with higher rights, we have not discussed user levels much yet) can change the license if the initially selected license is not correct.

These two fields must be hidden by default. User can open these fields by clicking on the link "copyright information": "If you are not the author of this piece you must add <a href="">copyright information</a>"

If license for piece is different than Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike? 2.5, then we must display it next to the piece in material view page. Otherwise users would think that text and image are both under Creative Commons license.

[tarmo]

How do we handle the situation when users try to create material from pieces with two different licenses? Well, we of course prevent it, but this kind of requires that users are aware of the licenses and select only content with one license for their material. And I think this was the reason why we chose to only have one license in the system.

[hans]

Just like Wikipedia. Look at this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_World_Cup_Trophy

They have always the same license for the textual content: "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License."

The first image is copyrighted and appears there under Fair use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Coupe_Jules_Rimet.jpg

The second image is under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike? 2.5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fifa_world_cup_org.jpg

The third image is in Public Domain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wohlfahrtsbriefmarke-fifa.jpg

I think that everything is legally OK, if all textual content in our templates is published under CC BY-SA, but some images are from Public Domain or under Free Documentation License. We must just state very clearly that this image is under X license. I think that in a web page we can consider text and images as separate works, because they are separate files. It will get fuzzy when somebody is printing out the website, because then works under different licenses are not separated anymore (of course we can put images to separate pages, and then it is OK again).

Wikipedia relies a lot on Fair use principle of US copyright law. We can't do that, because in other countries (for example Estonia) fair use principles are not so clearly written into the copyright law. Therefore we should allow only pieces that are under very clearly open license: CC BY-SA, PD or FDL.

Currently we can't use anything that is released to Public Domain, because we will automatically attach Creative Commons license to it.

[tarmo]

OK, I agree that under Fair Use we can combine different licenses. However, I don't think anyone has the right to relicense a resource - once it's been published under CC, you can't just revoke that. You can, of course, create a new version of it, and publish that under a different license. And you can publish an existing resource under several licenses, so later on you can add more licenses, but not take away (unless you clearly create a new, different version of it).

Therefore the license widget should allow multiple selection of licenses, and not allow removal of any preselected licenses for published resources (removing licenses from draft resources is ok).

[hans]

I think that it is important that "moderator" can change the license if user has published something under wrong license. For example user has uploaded a work that is in public domain and did not notice to change the license and enter the name of original author.

Another - more evil - way is to delete the content that is under wrong license.

[tarmo]

Well, that could be allowed, since if the original license selection is illegal, it is also invalid, and thus changing the license is ok. But normally (for your own copyrighted stuff) you would only be able to add new licenses after publishing.

[hans]

I think that users should not be able to add licenses to their own content. Keep it simple. CC-BY-SA is enough.

[hans]

Merged with #507 and closed.