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Topic: UQM wiki database (Read 6329 times)
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0xDEC0DE
*Many bubbles*
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Posts: 175
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In my opinion #1 is essential, it wouldn't be nice if you found out that after all the hard work you've done someone is selling it.
At the risk of derailing this thread, I am curious as to your rationale behind this opinion, and "how far" you are willing to go with it. As the authour of a creative work, the "final decision" of where and under what circumstances the work is distributed is yours, at least in the U.S. (and presumably the E.U.) You may give it away, sell it, license it to others to give away or sell, or bury it in the desert. It's yours, and it's your say.
For someone to take your work and sell it as their own is a clear-cut case of copyright violation, but so is giving away your work for free without your prior consent. One is commercial, the other non-commercial, but both are violations. I take from your stance that you see one as more "right" or "wrong" than the other; do I understand correctly? If I do, why do you think that?
For something a little more concrete, let's take the hypothetical case of someone who is willing to take the UQM game manual, turn it into book form, pay a pre-press shop to turn it into printing plates, and also to pay a bindery to make n-thousand copies in order to sell the manual to people who would like a hard copy. Do you have an overt problem with this? If they were to ask your permission to use your work, what would be necessary in order for you to give it to them? Proper accreditation? A percentage of the profits? Or is there no price that you would be willing to accept? Printing books is expensive, I would expect anyone other than a wealthy philanthropist to try and recoup their costs if they were going to make one.
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"I’m not a robot like you. I don’t like having disks crammed into me… unless they’re Oreos, and then only in the mouth." --Fry
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Ivan Ivanov
*Smell* controller
Offline
Gender: 
Posts: 296
Internet Piracy
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For someone to take your work and sell it as their own is a clear-cut case of copyright violation, but so is giving away your work for free without your prior consent. One is commercial, the other non-commercial, but both are violations. I take from your stance that you see one as more "right" or "wrong" than the other; do I understand correctly? If I do, why do you think that?
If you mean taking my work and giving or selling it, I say both of those things are wrong.
If you mean making a derivative work from my work, then it is a different story.
Simply put I don't want my work to be used by some greedy bastards. If someone is distributing something for free, I can assume that whatever he/she made was created for the sole pleasure of creation, if not, then at least I know that their motivation wasn't greed.
For something a little more concrete, let's take the hypothetical case of someone who is willing to take the UQM game manual, turn it into book form, pay a pre-press shop to turn it into printing plates, and also to pay a bindery to make n-thousand copies in order to sell the manual to people who would like a hard copy. Do you have an overt problem with this? If they were to ask your permission to use your work, what would be necessary in order for you to give it to them? Proper accreditation? A percentage of the profits? Or is there no price that you would be willing to accept? Printing books is expensive, I would expect anyone other than a wealthy philanthropist to try and recoup their costs if they were going to make one.
Depending on my work to his work ratio I would either want a percentage of profits or be satisfied with accreditation. But I would like to have a chat with this person before I agreed to anything.
If you're interested in why I think what I think:
I'm not a fan of copyright laws as they are today. Sure you need protection from people who want to live from your work, but everything should have its limits.
We (the human race in genreal) are not creators, we're rearrangers. All of our crative work needs inspiration. Nothing that we made was build from vacuum and in vacuum, our 'creation' is nothing more then taking something that already exists and placing it in a different pattern (which by the way also isn't our invention).
I'm not saying that it's bad. This is how we became what we are today - by gradually improving what we encountered. I'm saying that no one should be the only owner of his 'creation'.
If people are not allowed to improve others' works, all progress (cultural or technological) is effectively blocked.
To make things fair (read: to stop me from whining about commercial and non-commercial uses of crative works), the amount of time in wich the author has exclusive rights to his work needs to be drasticaly cut down, so that after, let's say 20 years (but not more then 5 in case of software), if Disney (...god I hate Disney) wanted to use some of my stuff in its new cartoon, I couldn't do jack, but the same would go for them if I wanted to make a Kill Mickey Mouse game.
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Your bruises are reminders of naivete and trust
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Bobucles
Guest
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Just a made up quote, which I though was relevant:
"The length of time that a copyright is valid is always 10 years more than Mikey Mouse's age."
It's in the U.S. constitution that people are entiled to protection of their intellectual property, for a limited time. Unfortunately, every 5 or so years, the duration of a copyright is increased by the same amount of time, or more. Sorta takes the point out of it, no? 
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Captain Smith
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Unfortunately this kind of stuff became relevant and prevalent when copyrights could be held by these fictional people called "corporations".
Just a made up quote, which I though was relevant:
"The length of time that a copyright is valid is always 10 years more than Mikey Mouse's age."
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0xDEC0DE
*Many bubbles*
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Posts: 175
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Yes, copyrights are evil, big corporations suck, blah blah blah. But this discussion is slightly different, in that we're taling about your rights, and how you would like to exercise them.
There are two extremes that one can take when asserting their rights under copyright law:- All rights reserved, no rights abdicated to the general public (this is "standard copyright")
- No rights reserved, all rights abdicated to the general public (this is "putting into the public domain")
The former is highly unworkable for a public project, because anyone wishing to make a derivative work must first obtain permission from all copyright holders first, which is a considerable barrier if the number of contributors is over a certain size.
The latter is probably also "unpalatable" to some, because it means that people may make derivative works without crediting or compensating the original authors in any way, and may even lock up the derivative works via standard copyright, e.g., Disney.
Thus, it becomes a question of what types of derivative works people would like to "pre-approve" to make redistribution and derivative works easier, and under what terms.
Personally, I object to any "for non-commercial use only" restrictions on ideological grounds. Hell, if someone published a book with something I wrote in it, I'd go out and buy a copy just to see my name in print.  But reasonable people can disagree on such matters, and "consensus" and "compromise" should be the watchwords of this discussion. IMO, of course.
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"I’m not a robot like you. I don’t like having disks crammed into me… unless they’re Oreos, and then only in the mouth." --Fry
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Sander Scamper
*Smell* controller
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Posts: 408
I'm not a little teapot
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The internet pretty much revolutionised this. If its copyrighted, its still free on the internet. Nothing is stopping someone from taking your work, and giving it away to the masses. Oh, except the RIAA =p
That said, someone who takes your work, whether your selling it or not, and sells it to make money, thats a breach.
Im on the honour system, which it seems, no one seems to follow. If i like a game or a movie or music or whatever enough, ill get it. Copyrighting has become far, far too ridiculous. Beauracracy is terrible, its a shame it controls the world =/
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"Oops!" KA-BOOM!!
"Space is a dangerous place where wimps eat flaming plasma death" -The Zot....or is it the Fot?? We may never know...unless the guy in the back tells us!
UQM/SC2 = World Peace.
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Art
Guest
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Well... the honor system is all well and good, but doing things that way has a tendency to lead to trouble in the future. The reason CC licenses were created was to make it more convenient to clearly lay out what you do and don't want done to your work so everyone can stay within the law and no one has to get mad and yell.
For example, I believe it's fairly easy to get a CC license that explicitly says you can distribute something freely as long as you don't charge for it or sell it, but can use it to make derivative works. That sort of thing.
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Art
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So you're saying creative monopoly is inevitable unless you throw everything into the public domain? It's possible, but I doubt it -- you're basically making a negative comment about the intent of content creators, and the fact is that in this world content creators already have all rights reserved to them from the beginning anyway, and any decision to waive those rights -- selling them to a distributor, releasing it through CC licenses, using the GNU license, or releasing into the public domain -- already comes from the creator's goodwill. If you think that's a problem, well, 1) many people would argue creators do have the right to control the results of their ideas anyway, and 2) it hasn't proven to be a problem when CC licenses and such are actually used.
In fact CC licenses prevent a lot of problems, because they put power squarely in the hands of goodwilled creators; if goodwilled creators don't use them then they open themselves up to theft and exploitation by badwilled creators, who tend to use every tool at their disposal without regard for principle. How many people who never bothered to fill out a proper license for their work have found it taken and sold on the mass market without their making a penny, and they can't do a thing about it because the burden of proof rests on *them* to show they came up with it first? People sometimes find themselves in the ironic position of being sued for the use of ideas that actually did originate with them because they can't prove they were the original creators. Authors avoid reading fanfiction and such precisely so they can be free from such accusations.
Wrenching this back on-topic, one thing is clear: There should *be* a license for any SC2 database no matter how you feel about the fact that we live in a society where law controls information ownership bla bla bla. It's not that much trouble and the kinds of trouble it can *save*, though unlikely, are well worth the effort; all we need is to clarify the permissions under which contributors contribute, much the way sites like Wikipedia do, and establish where existing corporate copyrights lie and how to avoid pissing off the copyright-holders.
This is a big deal precisely because the Internet is so powerful; make something on a Xerox machine and staple it together for your friends, no one'll care, but put something on the 'Net and raging questions about legal issues and ownership will explode into existence before your very eyes.
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Michael Martin
Core Team
*Smell* controller
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Posts: 387
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i don't like the noncommercial-use-only clause -- at least not for the whole thing. This is primarily because being part of a Linux distribution (UQM is already in at least four) is a "commercial use". This means that the documentation that ships with UQM wouldn't be able to excerpt the Wiki.
Attribution - at minimum to the database - isn't particularly controversial.
We can't do "NoDerivs" because that would defeat the whole point of a Wiki.
I have no real opinion on the sharealike clause.
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meep-eep
Forum Admin
Enlightened
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Posts: 2847
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Well, it's been decided.
The name will be "Ultronomicon", as it's been pretty well received and there were no real alternatives.
The license for the text will be the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
- Attribution, because noone would like to see their work being taken without being credited, or at least, noone would object to being credited.
- Not NonCommercial, because there seems little risk of actual commercial abuse, and it will prevent problems when derived manuals and such are included in Linux distributions.
- Not NoDerivs, as that would defeat the point of a wiki, as McMartin pointed out.
- Not ShareAlike, as it would mean less freedom, while we've got nothing to gain by it in practice.
For images, we'll need to make some templates to mark their copyright.
Anything that can be redistributed should be ok to use.
We have permission from Toys for Bob to include game images in the database.
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete
when at last there is no Void, no Non
when the Creators return
then we can finally rest.”
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