#Wikidata - No #copyright on common knowledge

The approach on copyright for text and data is imho utterly different. For your text you seek a reputable source, you cite it. All in all a lot of work.

A proper approach to data is that you seek confirmation on what you already know and it is encouraging when there are many sources that agree on what is common to all of them. When you add new data, typically most of what you care for you will find through links from existing shared data probably in multiple sources. This is not done by hand, too much work, it is done by bot and consequently there is not even some "sweat on the brow".

Arguably, common data exists as common knowledge. It is not proprietary to any one of these sources and consequently claiming copyright let alone a license is at least problematic.

When data is specific to one data source, it is inherently problematic. It may be wrong, particularly when it differs from what other sources state. It follows that there is a need for care before this data is used. You then get into a manual process of reconciling and curating the data, you may even decide to diverge from what all the others say. The confirmation and the creation of new data both is actually research. It is not the using of data from the other source. In my mind this means that there is no burden of copyright applicable.

When data is considered from Wikipedias for Wikidata, the same considerations apply. When you think about it, it is quite bizarre; you take expressions in words and convert it into a qualifier that represent said words, words that can be in any language. Words that may not even be what you see on your screen. The processing of texts may be automated and, it is easy to understand that from the input of all the Wikipedias alone a superset of data is created that is more than any one article. The notion that copyright can be legitimately claimed is problematic at best.

When you take all this on board, and the fact that individual facts cannot be copyrighted, it is obvious to me that the choice for a CC-0 licence for Wikidata is fortunate. A license implies copyright but it is given away with this licence. The claim of the copyright is at best a defensive strategy.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - #Copyright and linked data

There are many points of view when it comes to copyright and data. In the Wikipedia world the discussion is different because each text has its own copyright. Data is different because you can not own ie copyright a separate fact.

When data is open or opened up, it follows that much of the data that exist in multiple sources is identical. When the data is the same, it has two benefits. The first is quality. When multiple sources agree on something, it is more likely to be correct. The second is copyright; whose copyright?

Every now and again, the license used by Wikidata is questioned. Typically by Wikipedians who think they know their stuff. They will be the first to tell you the importance of sources and, indeed many factoids in Wikidata do not have a source. When a factoid is sourced, a statement like John Doe died on Friday, 13th, that factoid only links to the source and hardly to the place where it came to the attention of the person or the bot adding it to Wikidata.

When I add the fact that someone is a member of the Somalian parliament, when a list is used like this one, that information is sourced, there is no added value except for a name being on a list. It has been in the news that in the last year parliamentarians have been murdered, there is no article for them and consequently even in Wikipedia it is only a name on a list, no added value, no arguable reason for copyright.

Value is in the links, it is in knowing the same data to be true in many sources. Claiming copyright, particularly in data, is predatory. It prevents people from bringing facts together. Only when facts are brought together informed knowledge exists. Only in linked data, sourced data, there is a handle on fake facts and fake news.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia #Commons - Mr Tadeusz Łobos

The picture that illustrates the article about Mr  Łobos is licensed under the CC-by-sa license. Consequently it is a picture that should be available for use in Wikidata. It is not because it was not uploaded to Commons.

When a picture like this one is to be made generally available, it has to be uploaded again to Commons. It is a hassle and another round of bureaucracy will decide if this picture may remain at Commons.

There are many pictures that should be generally available and are not. In a similar way there are many pictures that are considered to be not generally available and as a consequence are no longer available at all.

All media files are equal in that they are in need of the same quality of meta-data and they are all equal in that their copyright and license situation is the same never mind where they have been uploaded.

The consequence is that the scope of a Wikidata approach to media files should not restrict itself to Commons.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Fixing a lamp with #3Dprinting

The next #copyright battle ground is likely to be all about 3D-printing. Consider the story of the IKEA lamp in Wired; the shade was broken and a designer created a dozen new shades. New shades were printed at a cost of $5,- and the availability of a 3D-printer for several hours.

When a design can be exactly replicated at will there is no need for the factories or shops of IKEA. Consider the impact on retail shops; there is no need for a lot of storage room; all that is needed is a powerful 3D-printer to provide customers what they want.

Obviously factory produced goods are cheap. The cost of a product is very much in things like transport, distribution, overhead and breakage. At this time 3D-printed goods are more expensive to produce. This will change and a new cottage industry will come to exist.

Designs owned by global players can be easily copied and changed and there is little to prevent this from happening. Obviously there will be a lot of copyright posturing and industries expecting royalties because 3D printers are there just to rip off the rights holders...

Ah well, it is the likely way of progress. I however like the notion of more local production.
Thanks,
    GerardM

Tagging #British paintings in public ownership

Another great British initiative: adding tags to the entire national collection of oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. What makes this project relevant is the huge number of volunteers collaborating on this.

The Public Catalogue Foundation has something to say about copyright. Sadly they are wrong. They say:

Is there copyright in the photographic image as well as copyright in the actual painting?
Yes, there is. The photographer uses training and skill to photograph a painting and he or she holds copyright in that photographic image. However, as part of its agreement with collections, the PCF agrees that its photographers will hand over copyright in all their photographic images for collections’ own use.

There is a word for this point of view: copyfraud. When this point of view is typically British, it is just that.

The PCF may claim copyright on the tags added to the paintings. There is no mention about this.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Depressed because of a #photo #competition

In many a #Wikipedia there is an article for almost every subject. All these articles need illustrations and  Commons is where these illustrations are stored. Some subjects are hard to illustrate. Subjects like depression or schyzophrenia for instance.

In my home town there was a competition to create something that expresses depression. There were prizes to be won and the jury included a professional photographer. There were many great entries to the competition. Having a professional photographer in the jury however was a mistake.

When you run a competition, there is a point to it. This contest had the intention to bring attention to the subject of depression. This means that the winning picture has to be published. Obviously it should be part of the conditions of entering the competition. It wasn't.

The professional photographer told the winner that the picture was of professional quality and that it is worth money. The result is that the picture is only available on the Intranet of the organisation running the competition.

The picture you see did not win.. It does show the Almere skyline. The weather was a bit depressed as well. Thanks Tamar for sharing your picture that "also ran". For me this picture is much more the winner because it is available.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Legacy projects II

When tools are no longer maintained, when they are no longer promoted, they die. The good news is that the tools created for the Myanmar language created by Keith Stribley have found a new home.

The question is to what extend are they salvageable and is it worth the effort. For software there are two primary considerations; copyright and licensing and, the source code.

Without source code the first question is less relevant and, the reference to the mercurial repositories is a reference to Keith's old website. This old website is gone. There are references to the CC-by-sa license on some pages but for software such a license is not really appropriate.

When you look at the subjects Keith covered, they are still very much relevant and impressive. At the Myanmar Wikipedia two out of three webfonts do not work for me. We do not have an input method yet. It will be great when we find that the tools Keith created can find another use.

The result of my previous post is this update. I hope that there will be a future update to this post bringing you more positive news.
Thanks,
     GerardM

What should get into #Wikibooks or #Wikisource

When the number of copies in existence of an important book like  "Nazism and euthanasia of the mentally ill in Germany" or "Die Tötung Geisteskranker" written by Alice Ricciardi-von Platen is less then twenty, it is important that such a book is transcribed and becomes widely available.

This book is the first book written on the murder of the mentally ill in the "third reich". It is based on her personal experiences and more importantly from her observations at the Nuremberg Doktors' trial. 

Mrs Ricciardi died and one of her family members promised to seek approval for the book to be available under a free license. Sadly we are still waiting.

It is however books, sources like this that are of an importance that go beyond the abstract niceties of copy right. Mrs Ricciardi did not get rich because of this book, there is no monetary value of the copyright.

It is however important that our generation, later generations do not have the excuse that "they did not know". Wikibooks and Wikisource are in a great position to play a role. In the mean time, I will ask my friend if he has an update about the copyright of the book by Mrs Ricciardi.
Thanks,
      GerardM

About #entertainment, #copyright and #representation

The American entertainment industry is struggling to increase its margins. This is done on the basis of "ownership of the industry". Read this Politico article for an update on how they want to sway your opinion.

There are several things in their approach that upset me. They call Wikipedia a company and by doing this they deny the existence of the community that created the wealth of knowledge embedded in our projects. The Wikimedia Foundation is like them, not an organisation that creates content but an organisation that represent those that do... with one stark difference; it is not business the WMF represents but people.

In the Politico article, it is said that putting the "stars" in the limelight of their campaign may hurt their value. It hurt Metallica in the past and it may hurt others in the future. This is in stark contrast with what happens when content is not an "industrial product". Our community does have people able and willing to explain the value we represent to our world. Its true value can be measured  for instance in our traffic statistics for Wikipedia or in the CD's and books provided to schools all over the world. We do not complain when people reuse the content of our Wikis, we know it increases the number of people our content reaches. When it does, it eventually has more people come to us directly and contribute. The same mechanism works for the industry; the people who are branded as "pirates" spend most on industry produced content.

The RIAA and the MPAA are proud to be American; it is in their name. This begs the question if they represent the industry as a whole or only American companies. When what they propose is implemented, it will affect the Internet negatively and it will have its effects beyond the US border.

Compare this to the WMF; it is proud to support over 280 language communities. It provides infrastructure to all of them and it will welcome even more people and even more languages. The people it enables are industrious and they provide the world with the quality content they create. They do not need "industry representation" to make it useful or valuable. Sadly it is the distorted message of how industry is represented that makes it necessary to waste time, effort and emotions on what should be a non-issue.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#DBpedia supports #WikipediaBlackOut

#WikipediaBlackOut for #Wikipedia

#WikiLivres

#Copyright is limited in time. The intention of copyright is twofold; it has always been a tool to curtail the distribution of information and it has been intended to extend the period an author can monetise exclusively a work authored by this person.

When you look at the politics of copyright, it is very much companies who insist on exorbitant measures to prevent activities they find objectionable. As they are not the beneficiaries of copyright, authors are, it places them as censors of the web; money is their objective. When you look at the track record of these companies and the organisations set up by them to do their dirty work, you find a long list of them not making payments to the authors whose rights they claim to protect. A great example are the compilation albums; the individual authors, bands almost never get what Big Content ought to pay them.

The situation is so stupid that it has been proven time and again that the people who download "illegal" music or movies are the same people who spend money buying DVD's  or going to the movies. This does not prevent this industry to insist that people are "stealing" and that they are losing money as a result.

Wikilivres is a website with a rich amount of content. It is based in Canada because the Canadian copyright laws are not as miserable as the USA laws are. The hosting has so far been done by a person, it has become too much of a burden. The hope is that the Canadian Wikimedia chapter will take over this wonderful project. It will give the Canadian chapter a reason to fight against the introduction of changes that will make the current Canadian copyright restrictions as obnoxious as the restrictions that prevail in their southern neighbour.
Thanks,
      GerardM

When USA #copyright rules are too restrictive

The moment when when sources lose their copyright restrictions is not universal. Three countries with rules that are not as restrictive as required by the WMF are Australia, Canada and India. Their Wikimedia chapters and communities have to abide by the American rules when they are to use Wikimedia's Wikisource, Wikibooks or Commons.

Wikilivres is a personal project by Yann where sources can be found that are suffering under the more restrictive USAmerican rules. When you visit Wikilivres, you find more than 3,000 books and documents, and 1,000 images in 16,028 pages from more than 750 authors. There are "main pages"  in fifteen languages; it is big for a site run by one person.

Yann is a long time Wikimedian and, when a credible organisation wants to take over this project, it is more then likely that he can be persuaded to hand over the reigns. As a request has been made for an Indian project for publications out of Indian copyright, this is a great opportunity for chapters to collaborate on.

It will serve as a full project in our Wikimedia movement and it will give us the opportunity to celebrate when books, sources or images can be moved to the WMF projects.

Copyright is restrictive, it harms the dissemination of culture and knowledge. Adopting Wikilivres is a great signal to countries with overly restrictive copyright rules.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Europeana calculating for public domain

It is often pertinent to know if something is in the public domain or not. Europeana brings us a calculator that helps you decide for 13 European countries at this time. Calculators for more legislatures will follow.

While it is fun to play with such functionality, it would be nice if the calculator would not only work for a country but would also be available in the language of that country. At translatewiki.net we are ready to localise this as well as other Europeana functionality.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Copyright and the family album

The #Wikipedia articles on Alice Ricciardi-von Platen do not have an illustration. When my friend Jan Velterop asked me for help getting her article written, I asked him if he could get me a picture.

Alice von Platen

This picture of a young Alice was taken probably in 1939. The photographer is unknown and this picture was taken from a family album with the intention to make it publicly available. If there must be a copyright, it would be licensed as CC-sa but for all intends and purposes it can be considered to be in the public domain.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Helping a friend with a #Wikipedia article

Jan Velterop  is a friend. He wanted to write an article in Wikipedia and got stumped with all the technical hurdles. The article was about a person that is relevant; a person that has already articles in the Italian and German Wikipedias. His concept was filled with hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles and there were sources as well.

The article was written in MS-Word and all I had to do was copy and paste the text, make wikilinks out of hyperlinks add some sections and there was a great start.  I am not strong on the citation stuff so I left them in as I found them.

The article is about Alice Ricciardi-von Platen, Mrs Ricciardi was famous for writing about the murder on mentally ill people in Nazi Germany.. She was an observer at the Nuremberg Doktors' trial. The observers wrote two books about this "Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit" and "Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung". Both books were printed in a large volume but not distributed nowadays less then 20 copies exist in libraries.

If any books deserve to be digitised and become widely available it is these books as the prevailing feeling was/is that it was not the doctors who were to blame. Mrs Ricciardi's book "Die Tötung Geisteskranker in Deutschland" was largely ignored for the same reason.

Maybe Mr Velterop can help to make Mrs Ricciardi's book available under a free license otherwise we will have to wait for a very long time before the copyright expires. Having information available about this is what helps make a world conscience.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Dutch expats want Dutch #movies

Almost all Dutch movies and series will be available on ximon.nl. It comes at a cost, but it is the same cost you pay at a rental. For expatiates however this is a God-send as the nearest rental store with Dutch films will likely be in Belgium or the Netherlands.

Getting the rights for all this material has been a big obstacle. For most recent material agreements exist and as always, it is the old material that proves to be a problem. At the moment almost half the pictures can be seen from abroad and this is expected to improve.

There is again some agitation to prevent illegal downloads in the Netherlands. The irony is that the film industry does still struggles to get its act together. What is the point of making something illegal when there is no legal alternative?
Thanks,
      GerardM

What is the point of publishing cultural heritage on the web II

The "Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed" is missing out on the benefits of crowd sourcing. When you have to pay for what is on offer, would you share the result of work done on the images made available on its website?

In a previous blog I mentioned that much of the material shown is out of copyright anyway and, claiming the availability under a restricting license is copy fraud. The illustration was a print by C. van Noordt dated 1756, and it was pointed out to that as it is a print this makes it even more audacious to claim rights.

This digital restored image of the Diever church is a wonderful example of what can be achieved in the crowd space. As an illustration it serves better then the stained original. It is also debatable if the restoration will refer to the cultureel erfgoed website. While any claim to the rights of this print is bogus, a print allows for multiple sources and sourcing it can potentially create problems.

Not sourcing it is however a bad practice.
Thanks.
      GerardM

Plan your #holidays with Wiki loves #Monuments in mind

When you are playing the tourist, it is nice to be on a mission, when you are not only moving about "because that is what you do" but  when your movements have a purpose. Wiki loves Monuments can give you such a purpose.

The Wikimedia chapters of Europe are working together in one big photo competition to document the architectural heritage of Europe. Some countries like Belgium do not take part because there is no Belgium chapter and others like Italy do not take part because their laws assume copyright of Italian monuments.

This Belgium problem can be solved by its Wikimedians.

Italy deserves a quite different response. Just do not go. Ignoring Italy as a travel destination because your pictures are not yours to license is quite appropriate. A solution may be found in cooperation with the regional authorities in Italy; when this allows us to ignore such silly dictates from Rome, you will find it amazing what the Italian country side has to offer.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Making Dutch orphan works available to the public

The Dutch National Archive and Pictoright, a branch organisations for copyright holders of graphic and illustrative material have come to an agreement to make digitised material that is without a known rights holder.

As part of the "images for the future" digitisation project there is so much material without known rights holders that it is impossible to research them all. The agreement makes it possible for the Nationaal Archief to make all the digitised pictures available on its website.

Women protesting the 1980 abortion law

This is good. This is important. However... when the images are to be made available elsewhere on the Internet, payments are still required and it will be Pictoright that will do the research into the rights holders. Maximising the money generated will allow Pictoright to do the best it can.

The experience with the Bundesarchiv proved that making images restricted in size to Commons made a huge difference to the sale of high resolution images. It would be wonderful if we can persuade the parties involved to share with us this treasure trove so that we can better illustrate our projects and they will make more money.
Thanks,
     GerardM