NcddWikiCopyright is where the statement will ultimately go. (There's a DRAFT there now)
I still have some Copyright Questions. But here is the situation as i understand it so far, with references. --JohnAbbe
Summary
When someone writes something, law generally gives legal rights - copyright - to them over what they have written. No one else may do anything with their work, except for Fair Use and any uses for which the creator gives permission. Often when a work is published there is an accompanying "copyright license", which may give specific permissions to anyone who gets ahold of the published work.
When work is submitted to a wiki, at a minimum we want the wiki administrators to have the legal right to publish the work, and for all wiki participants to have the right to edit it. These rights may be given by default, through a combination of implied consent and publishers' rights to anonymous work (see below). Additional rights - such as for NCDD to republish material here outside of the wiki, or for NCDD to (by blanket license or case-by-case permission) offer others the right to republish or create derivative works outside the wiki - require a more assertive copyright statement.
The Ncdd Copyright Statement attempts to not depend on the default copyright, and asserts that by submitting their work, participants are granting NCDD certain rights. We'll link to the statement prominently from the edit page.
[Please correct anything i have wrong, and tell me if someone has spelled this out more clearly elsewhere.]
Let's separate the issues regarding copyright and wikis into these sections:
Who holds copyright on material being submitted to a wiki?
What implied rights are given by the copyright holders, and to whom?
What other rights (if any) do wiki administrators and participants have?
Who holds copyright on material being submitted to a wiki?
Copyright on material coming into the wiki is held by: the person submitting it, no one at all (public domain), the wiki publisher, or a third party:
Participants who sign original work hold copyright on it.
In some jurisdictions, an author may by explicit statement place a work in the public domain. No one holds copyright on public domain material; any use of it whatsoever is legally permitted.
Unsigned work (and pseudonymous work if the author is truly unknown) falls under Article 15, section 3 of the Berne convention . The relevant bit: "the publisher whose name appears on the work shall, in the absence of proof to the contrary, be deemed to represent the author, and in this capacity be [sic] shall be entitled to protect and enforce the author's rights. The provisions of this paragraph shall cease to apply when the author reveals his identity and establishes his claim to authorship of the work." So, copyright to anonymous work is by default held by the wiki administrators (or more precisely, whomever is considered the legal publisher of the wiki). If there is a clear copyright statement on the wiki, then original anonymous work would explicitly fall under that instead.
The copyright on any other material submitted by a participant is held by some third party. The only legal uses of such material are those that are permitted by fair use, or by any licenses (if any) the material has been published under. is U.S. law. It's "fair dealing" in Canada & some other countries.
Note: in addition to copyright on the text people write, there is also collections copyright (in the Berne Convention, article 2 section 5 ; U.S. law refers to it as compilation copyright). Collection or compilation copyright is held by editors of (for example) dictionaries, anthologies and moderated newsgroups (see and ). This is not a copyright on any text itself, but instead on the collection of it, the particular juxtaposition of various bits of content (which each remain under the copyright of whomever wrote them except as noted above). In the case of a wiki, it would seem that the compilation copyright would be held in pieces by whichever participants create Wiki Links, edit page names, move bits of text around, etc. However this work is almost exclusively anonymous, which under the section of the Berne Convention already cited would give the collections/compilation copyright to the wiki publisher.
What implied rights are given by the copyright holders, and to whom?
Implied consent has become an important factor of thought about copyright law regarding the Internet. If i e-mail to a mailing list, the idea of implied consent would suggest that i agree to you quoting my e-mail in your response, as this is a normal and expected practice in mailing lists. If you publish your original work on the World Wide Web, you are arguably giving your implied consent for that web page to be stored in the RAM of others' computers, and in a cache on their hard disks, as both of these are part of the normal operation of the World Wide Web.
There is not much case law on this. Forging ahead though...
In the case of a wiki, the "normal operation" includes not just publishing a submitter's work (very much as with the case of publishing a page on the World Wide Web), but also allowing others to edit your work (legal-speak: create derivative works) within the wiki. This is a significant part of the legal foundation of the "default copyright" approach of Ward's Wiki and Meatball Wiki - that we don't need to explicitly get consent from wiki participants for such editing, because by submitting their work they have given implied consent.
Note that if someone submits a third party's copyrighted material, the submitter does not hold copyright on the material, and therefore cannot give any consent, implied or otherwise.
What other rights (if any) do wiki administrators and participants have?
Existing wikis' copyright statements generally follow one of two strategies: a default copyright - claiming as little as possible for a wiki to work; or an assertive copyright - informing participants that by submitting their work they grant certain rights to the wiki administrators (and possibly to others).
What rights (if any) do readers have beyond reading and editing the material in the wiki?
Default - No additional rights. That is, no one may do anything with material in the wiki (text and compilation), other than read it and edit it within the wiki, rights which may be seen as being given as a matter of implied consent, rather than as a result of any explicit statement to that effect on the wiki. Of course anyone is free to seek permission from copyright holders.
In the original wiki, Ward Cunningham explicitly claims copyright on unsigned work. This makes it possible for people who want to use such material from the original wiki to seek permission from c2.com; see . This does not count as a strong claim because the Berne Convention explicitly grants copyright powers to publishers in the case of anonymous text.
Strong - Different wikis have declared submissions to grant different rights to the wiki administrators, allowing them to re-release the information under various different licenses. Here are a few:
Free/open. Anyone may copy this work and make derivative works, even outside of the wiki. Some of these licenses also require that the same license apply to any such republication or derivative work (these are sometimes called copyleft, share alike, or viral licenses). These rights are generally non-exclusive, meaning that the original author also retains copyright (so they could, for example, negotiate a deal with someone to pay them for the right to release a derivative work under a proprietary license, even if the work is available through the wiki under a copyleft license).
GNU Free Documentation License (copyleft)
(Primarily) public domain. Anyone may do anything they like with this work. In some jurisdictions, work can be placed in the public domain by the creator explicitly disclaiming all rights to it. In other jurisdictions this is difficult or even impossible. The idea of "primarily public domain" has been developed, for copyright holders to assert that they have no intent to pursue legal action regardless of what anyone does with their work. See .
Other possible licenses:
The various Creative Commons licenses (includes some of the above)
Other references:
When you click on "choose license" at http://creativecommons.org/license/, you get the following questions:
1. Require attribution? (I think this should be "no" since the author of wiki pages is so hard to trace; we could, I suppose, require attribution of "NcddWiki," but then what if some of the content was cut and pasted from other sources?)
2. Allow commercial uses of your work? (I think this one should be "no.")
3. Allow modifications of your work? (I think this should be a "yes.")
So that's my opinion about the Creative Commons stuff. What do others think?
--SandyHeierbacher
Regarding 1, i think you're right we'd have to customize the license (something we may end up doing anyway) if we want to require attribution. We could also leave it as is, and simply request attribution with no legal "requirement". I suppose the no on 2 might make it legal for us to include more third-party material, under Fair Use. Of course people could ask our permission to do commercial work; they'd have to watch out for any third-party material then. --JohnAbbe
Earlier discussion
I've edited the stuff that Andy and Tom talked about on the mailing list, and added some of my own thoughts & understanding. Please correct if i've missed stuff, and please help out with the remaining questions/issues. --JohnAbbe
No license will protect us from complaints. The NCDD sitewide copyright statement - http://www.thataway.org/main/copyright.html - addresses this with:
Copyrights to these third party resources rest solely in the hands of the source or the original author. Questions concerning the use of this third party material should be directed to the source or original author.
If you find any material that you feel has been used or presented improperly, please contact us immediately and we will work with you to change it to suit your needs or remove it entirely.
Perhaps we should consider a more flexible approach where we identify the copyright holder of third-party material - maybe through a "used with permission" statement - on the pages where this material makes up the majority of the content and also establish a broader "Creative Commons" type setup for original material generated by the wiki. At the same time, we could add to the Participating In Wiki page a "QuotingOthersMaterial" page which says "Please include the URL or reference for any material you copy from another site and, when editing, please make sure that such references are not lost. Post them at the bottom of the page with a note 'material on this page was derived from the following sources. --TomAtlee
The 'bottom' part sounds like good general practice for references, but for third-party text if there's a copyright issue we'd want a note to be right next to the quoted material, neh? Saying something like 'this material Copied Without Permission, do not edit' - that page could have something about Fair Use and something asking people to notify us if they aren't happy about it. If it's copied with permission then we're okay, we just have to keep a repository of the written permission somewhere; link/reference to the source would be a courtesy but not required. The potential for messiness here is why i'd suggest that we ask folks to generally not submit anything that isn't their original work, and with permission for everything that's in our license. --JohnAbbe
It might even be possible to add a permanent section to the bottom of every page which says "BIBLIOGRAPHY: Material on this page was derived from the following sources (URLs, books, articles, etc.):" which will remind people to put their references in. That at least shows we aren't claiming this material as our own, which would probably help us, should anybody try to sue us for copyright violation and we claim fair use. --TomAtlee
