Concerning legal copyright status -- important

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Concerning legal copyright status -- important

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Postby V » Sun Dec 09, 2007 10:20 pm

An important matter is copyright for the site.

Many of the biggest "online encyclopedia wikis" are owned directly by the MediaWiki foundation: Wookiepedia (Star Wars), Memory Alpha (Star Trek), and Halopedia.

These are technically owned by the MediaWiki Foundation (Wikia) and use the "GNU FDL" license.

Some other ones like Lostpedia or HeroesWiki are not owned by the MediaWiki Foundation, but use the "Creative Commons" license. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_License

Legally speaking though, I don't think even the "Creative Commons" license is what we want.

Currently, the Evapedia/FGP lists it as functioning under the GNU FDL license-->this isn't a "copyright", this is "copyleft" crap: it allows people to reuse content from this site FOR FREE. FOR FREE.

Legally thinking I think the Evapedia and Greater Fan Geeks Project should all be the copyrighted intellectual property owned specifically by Rachel Clark and Aaron Clark, who host the damned site. Enough of this wikipedia share and share alike bullcrap. For example, TheOneRing.net is actually OWNED by specific people (Tehanu and Xoanon, etc.)

MediaWiki is simply a tool we loaded to build a better site, but it should not change the copyright status of this material.

If ever we want to....I dunno, collect all of the essays we write on the site about Eva and publish them as a book called "The People's Guide to Evangelion"...we need to have everything copyrighted exclusively. (Hey, it's worked for TheOneRing.net when they wrote the People's Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien)
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Postby Reichu » Sun Dec 09, 2007 10:33 pm

Neither Aaron nor I want to have the burden of "ownership" for this thing. An organization is to be created specifically for the project, and it would be the honorary holder of copyrights and such. (The matter of who represents the organization at any given time and blah blah blah is something else.) I haven't looked into exactly how to go about officially creating an organization/foundation, so, if someone else wants to save me the trouble...

Legal mumbojumbo regarding the copyrights of all those other people (Gainax, Khara, etc.) and our justification for using their properties needs to be implemented, too.
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Re: Concerning legal copyright status -- important

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Postby BobBQ » Sun Dec 09, 2007 10:47 pm

V wrote:Currently, the Evapedia/FGP lists it as functioning under the GNU FDL license-->this isn't a "copyright", this is "copyleft" crap: it allows people to reuse content from this site FOR FREE. FOR FREE.

Enough of this wikipedia share and share alike bullcrap.

Your delusions of grandeur are becoming intolerable.

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Postby Ornette » Sun Dec 09, 2007 10:48 pm

Creative Commons is just GFDL with added clarification on certain materials. Everything (except Wikipedia) that is part of the Mediawiki Foundation is exactly GFDL (MediaWiki Foundation is not a copyright holder). As for TOR.NET, the only copyright notice I see on the site is this: "Design and original photography however are copyright © 1999-2007", which means the content itself is not copyrighted, only the website design and original photography. Not using a copyleft would mean we can't have ANY screenshots, translations, transcripts, etc. We can't use free-use if we intend to copyright the contents here.

As for essays, there's nothing stopping us from creating a separate copyright notice (aside from the one I already wrote up for mediawiki) that states it's copyrighted under the original author and does not fall under free-use or the GFDL.

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Postby V » Sun Dec 09, 2007 10:55 pm

I'm simply worried about people stealing stuff from the site.

BobBQ wrote:
V wrote:Currently, the Evapedia/FGP lists it as functioning under the GNU FDL license-->this isn't a "copyright", this is "copyleft" crap: it allows people to reuse content from this site FOR FREE. FOR FREE.

Enough of this wikipedia share and share alike bullcrap.

Your delusions of grandeur are becoming intolerable.



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Postby Mr. Tines » Mon Dec 10, 2007 2:19 am

And here I was thinking with a thread title like that that it would be about concerns that we are treading on dubious territory with the commentary project side of things, which is giving script and images at a level that pushes the envelope of fair use for review purposes...

V wrote:I'm simply worried about people stealing stuff from the site.


This sort of fanac is part of the internet gift economy.
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Postby drinian » Mon Dec 10, 2007 12:35 pm

There are recent moves in the works to make the GFDL compatible with some Creative Commons licenses; more importantly, the Creative Commons licenses are much better written for wiki-style editing. I propose moving to Creative Commons BY-SA before moving on.

It is possible to set up a wiki in such a way that contributing authors surrender their copyright to a central authority such that it is all owned by the "EvaGeeks Foundation" or some such thing. This would allow multiple-licensing of the text such that a rewritten book could be published. Even doing this, however, will probably start to put burdens on contributors' goodwill, and the print market is largely dead anyway.

If you really want people to contribute, you need to use BY-SA terms. I would not contribute to a wiki that didn't allow free/libre re-use.

Oh, and V, if Gainax took your view of copyright, they would probably block your creation of any sort of unofficial Evangelion guide, much as J.K. Rowling is currently attempting to do.

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Postby Ornette » Mon Dec 10, 2007 1:18 pm

@drinian: any interest in writing up the copyrights page? (I wrote up a temporary one that outlines some of what you've mentioned)

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Postby drinian » Mon Dec 10, 2007 1:27 pm

One more thought, if we used something other than BY-SA it would probably be difficult for us to transclude text from Wikipedia (which may be useful at some point).

Ornette wrote:@drinian: any interest in writing up the copyrights page? (I wrote up a temporary one that outlines some of what you've mentioned)

Be happy to take a look at it, but probably not until this coming weekend.

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Postby Sailor Star Dust » Mon Dec 10, 2007 3:47 pm

drinian wrote:much as J.K. Rowling is currently attempting to do.


Wow, that's stupid. Unofficial guides for things ARE able to be made, provided credit is given where credit is due. eg, this: http://www.warriorsoflegend.com/ (No, I haven't read or ordered the darn thing yet though I want to.)

Anyway, I agree that copyleft is a good way to go since that's the only way we could use screenshots, transcripts, and the like

Also, we probably should create a separate copyright notice for essays, etc because of this little tidbit that shows when you edit pages:

Please note that all contributions to The NGE Fan-Geeks Project are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 (see Project:Copyrights for details). If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!


Mr. Tines wrote:about concerns that we are treading on dubious territory with the commentary project side of things, which is giving script and images at a level that pushes the envelope of fair use for review purposes...


I'm concerned about that, myself. Getting my ass sued in spite of being a poor full-time college student sounds like a whole lot of No Fun. >_<
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Postby Ornette » Mon Dec 10, 2007 3:55 pm

Sailor Star Dust wrote:Also, we probably should create a separate copyright notice for essays, etc because of this little tidbit that shows when you edit pages:

Please note that all contributions to The NGE Fan-Geeks Project are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 (see Project:Copyrights for details). If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

The only changes I can think of that needs to be done is the notice at the bottom of all the pages saying that everything is in the mediawiki is under the GFDL (or commons, or whatever copyleft we choose to use) EXCEPT WHEN EXPLICITLY STATED. Also, at the bottom, I suggest adding that Evangelion etc etc is copyrighted by GAINAX, Khara, etc etc. I don't know how you edit what's at the bottom of the page, maybe one of the mediawiki admins can do this.

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Postby drinian » Mon Dec 10, 2007 9:54 pm

So are we sticking with the GFDL? If we wanted to move to CC-BY-SA, now would be the time before there's too many people who have to agree to the license change.

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Postby Ornette » Mon Dec 10, 2007 10:45 pm

drinian wrote:So are we sticking with the GFDL? If we wanted to move to CC-BY-SA, now would be the time before there's too many people who have to agree to the license change.

creative commons is fine by me, it's more in line for digitally distributed media (like a website). We should probably get some of the other people to OK it first though (or just do it and change it back if people complain).

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Postby Ornette » Tue Feb 05, 2008 11:14 pm

BUMPING this.

So, is everyone cool with moving to the Creative Commons Share Alike public license? I think I'll be able to change all of the links and images to the GNU FDL to the CC-SA link and image without much suffering. Afterwards, the copyright page needs to be edited a bit to reflect the CC-SA license.

Also, I can add a copyright notice at the bottom of the forums saying that the content of the forums are owned by the users who posted it. Is that reasonable?

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Postby Sailor Star Dust » Wed Feb 06, 2008 4:33 pm

All of that sounds good to me at least. :w00:
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Postby UrsusArctos » Wed Feb 06, 2008 8:27 pm

No problem with CC-SA.
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Postby V » Wed Feb 06, 2008 10:36 pm

yeah ok, make sure the usual "the names "Evangelion", all character names, etc. are property of Gainax, etc." stuff.
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Postby Ornette » Tue Feb 26, 2008 5:33 am

BUMP

So no problems with changing the license over?

Just so it's easier to look over the CC-SA license:
General Overview: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Explicit Legal Code of the CC by SA license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode


If nobody has any problems, I'm going to change this over.

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Postby UrsusArctos » Tue Feb 26, 2008 8:04 pm

Looks okay to me. No objection.
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Postby UrsusArctos » Thu Apr 03, 2008 1:46 am

OMF, I thought I'd bump this thread in case you hadn't seen it. Do you think it's worth changing over to a CC-SA license at all?
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