Wikipedia / Copy Discussion

Would it be ok to include pictures or texts from senseis at wikipedia? From a copyright perspective. Benni

Morten: WikiPedia is published under a different copyright regime than SL, and it is not obvious to me we can publish Wikipedia content here or vice versa. The rights and obligations under the SL OCL are not the same as those under the Wikipedia GFSL.

Specifically, what would you like to accomplish by copying an instance of the SL content as opposed to providing links on Wikipedia?

DougRidgway Maintaining two forks of the same information does seem like a bad idea, but I think Benni was just interested in sprucing up the Wikipedia entry a bit, relying on material from SL. Skimming the licenses, they seem so similar both in spirit and detail that it is difficult for me to imagine a copyright holder raising an irresolvable issue. These licenses are meant to be enabling, not disabling.

Velobici Wikipedia has the concept of being a single source of information. They discourage the use of external links (URLs that do not point to another page within Wikipedia) and relegate external links to an "External Links" section of each page. An example of this is the The game of Go page at Wikipedia...there is an "External links" section at the bottom of the page. SL appears in the "miscellaneous" section at the very bottom.

It is not clear to me what will be accomplished by copying content. How will this help the Go community? Why not have Wikipedia continue to provide a link to SL?

I just want to copy some pictures generated here in SL to some pages in the german wikipedia. There is no German counterpart of SL in the moment (and for me this is a to big project in the moment), so I just wanted to improve the German wikipedia just a bit with some examples for tesuji. instead of generating the images myself - which is of course not such a big deal I thought maybe I could take them from here.

I think the OCL is not comptible with the GFDL, which is used in Wikipedia, AFAIK. So, unfortunately I have to generate new material :-( Benni

DougRidgway (rant on, WME fodder) I realize it's perhaps easier to redo the content than to even read the licenses, much less get comfortable with all the legalities, but it seems to me that if people don't feel comfortable reusing / sampling / extending the content in such a similar context, maybe we're doing something wrong. The whole point of Open licenses, from the GPL onwards, is to enable and encourage copying and reuse. It seems ironic that slight (perhaps nonexistent, we could ask KfLenz) differences in two Open Content licenses would result in effectively undermining the basic purpose of both of them, because people don't feel comfortable copying from one to the other. (rant off)

tapir: Do recent Wikipedia license changes affect SL-Wikipedia relations in any way?

Arno: No, I'm afraid. The OPL (used here at SL) is incompatible both with the GFDL and CC licenses. OPL is very much like the CC BY-SA license, but different enough (e.g. commercial use) that if you would really try it in court, one cannot use OPL content in CC and vice versa. The problem arose because SL predates both GFDL and CC licenses. It was the best (only) "open content" license available back then.

I chose an open content license so that the community was protected from me doing silly stuff with SL's content (like e.g. suddenly charging for it.) There are several examples of popular web pages with user generated content where exactly this happened - without users being allowed to put the content up on another site.

Sadly enough, the original creators of the OPL license moved on to work on CC, but never published an OPL license that allowed for migration to CC. Wikipedia was able to move to CC, because GFDL now has a clause that allows migration to CC. I'm not sure that SL can go the same route (apart from OPL being abandoned): we never had a clause that said "under V1.0 or any later version of this license." Although SL never explicitly mentioned the version number either. For better or worse, I think we are stuck with the OPL, unless we decide to break the copyrights of contributors and suddenly decide to publish SL's content under e.g. CC BY-SA. I would not advise this move, as we would have to undo every edit of anyone who is not in favor of the change.

unkx80: I thought that the noncommercial clause of the OPL makes it more similar in spirit to the CC BY-NC-SA license. I am not a lawyer, but I guess OPL is compatible to none of the CC licenses.

Arno: my understanding is that OPL allows commercial use as long as you do not charge for the content itself (albeit one can charge a reasonable amount for offline copies - see section 1,) whereas CC BY-NC-SA section 4c restricts commercial use as such. So I'd say it's closer to CC BY-SA. For example, the GoGoD CD includes an SL snapshot, which is ok by OPL standards, but (which I'm pretty sure) would be forbidden by CC BY-NC-SA.

tapir: Thank you! I am fine with it. Limited interchange may in the long run be better for SL, in my opinion. Especially with Wikipedia policies regarding outside links, i feel like Wikipedia takes from everywhere but doesn't give back.

As I understood the discussion about license change in the (german) Wikipedia it will be contested (in Court?) as well and was at least partly about naming or not of (main) authors which is quite important if it is commercially used.

unkx80: Arno, thanks for the explanation. I think I understand it better now.

Hyperpapeterie: Although there are others who've worked on SL who might know more, let me say that the official requirements concerning citations and verification are higher on wikipedia than SL. So aside from licensing issues, much of the content of SL couldn't be easily moved to wikipedia.