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  • From: Chitu Okoli <Chitu.Okoli AT concordia.ca>
  • To: AcaWiki <acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [acawiki-general] Wikilit question about site license
  • Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2012 22:36:24 -0400

Thanks, Mike, for your reply. My comments are below.

-------- Message original --------
Sujet: Re: [acawiki-general] Wikilit question about site license
De : Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>
Date : 11 Mars 2012 15:35:40

Use of 3rd party CC-BY materials actually doesn't work with
copyright assignment (modulo fair use and other exceptions of
course). CC-BY licensors retain their copyright, which could not be
assigned by anyone other than said licensors.

Thanks for clearing that up.

If you're not importing materials from elsewhere, I'd suggest CC-BY.
Actually I'd even suggest CC0 especially if your site is to be
transitory. Or make sure you specify attribution to some stable URL
with copyright info about the materials, or make sure waive the
attribution requirement.

We expect to specify a working paper, and eventually a published journal
article, for attribution. So, the source of attribution would be long-term,
even though the site might not be. Moreover, if we export the data, the data
should survive the possible demise of our site. I don't understand your
argument here for recommending CC-BY or CC0, but ...

But if one of your main goals is to push
other sites toward CC-BY-SA, obviously you should use that
license...

We have no intention of pushing other sites to doing anything. Our preference
for CC-BY-SA is simply that just as we are sharing our data with others, we
hope that if others transform it in ways useful to us in the future, they
would share these derivatives with us, without locking us out through
enforcing all rights reserved copyright (whether of their own volition or due
to publisher requirements).

IIRC CC-BY was
chosen as AcaWiki started from a small grant from the Hewlett
Foundation's education program, which generally requires CC-BY. That
grant is obviously long over and AcaWiki could move to CC-BY-SA. I
think it would not be a bad idea to given that I think we're pretty
interested in ingesting info from elsewhere, and CC-BY-SA presently
maximizes ability to do that. And/or AcaWiki could depend on fair use
and other exceptions.

If this is the case, then we would almost certainly go with CC-BY-SA for our
data release. If I can pitch in my opinion as an outsider who would like to
get more involved with AcaWiki in the future, switching AcaWiki to CC-BY-SA
would likely significantly increase people's contributions to it. (I believe
Wikipedia's popularity is critically related to the copyleft provision of the
GFDL it initially adopted.) There's something rather chilling to free
contribution about the possibility that you could be locked out of the fruits
of your own contribution by some opportunist who commercializes your
contribution and then tries to sell it back to you. As the Bible says, we
shouldn't muzzle the ox that treads the grain....

is there a feasible way to release CC-BY-SA data, yet
somehow make the data available for AcaWiki?

I'm hoping someone could suggest if there is a way to still contribute our
data to AcaWiki with its CC-BY, even if we do release the dataset CC-BY-SA.

Thanks again,
Chitu





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