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IAQ = infrequently asked questions!
Someone has put a query box on FAQ. I will copy the contents here:
What is the copying license for nlab content? It would be great if there was a formal GFDL or CC-BY-SA license, so that people could transfer content between the nlab and Wikipedia. Lots of useful cross-pollination could take place that way.
I have wondered about that cross-pollination myself. Nice to hear that others are tinking similarly.
I don’t know much about the license business. Sounds funny to put a license on a piece of math. But if that’s what it takes to increase intraction between two wiki projects, I am in favor of it.
We’ve never adopted a licence, although all of my work is under a very permissive one that allows copying to Wikipedia (or anywhere else).
If we want people to be able to copy to the nLab from Wikipedia, then they need a way to state that their work is licensed under the CC-by-sa licence, and everybody who builds upon their work would have to release their contributions under the same licence. Otherwise the copy on the nLab is a copyright infringement.
If anybody wants to put current nLab material on Wikipedia, then they need permission from everybody who’s contributed to that material. The steering committee has no legal authority to grant this retroactively.
If we want to make future nLab material automatically eligible for transfer to Wikipedia, then we can do this (in various ways), but then we face the tricky problem of keeping this separate from the old material (or at least old material for which we can’t get permission).
I am against UNIVERSAL formal statement such as licences. People in nLab are exposing both the new and the standard material, correct and incorrect, trial and discussions, and the level of copying allowed, and verbatim/eness level depends on the case by case fair reasoning. Sometimes one could copy material verbatim without quoting the source, sometimes with quoting the source and sometimes should not copy too verbatim at all. We should give fair guideliness rather than lawyer’s statements. The first need a genuine interpreter, the latter are just an imperialistic feed for a parasite system of draining the resource from those who can be tricked. Avoid it at the beginning. Don-t enter Kafka’s process. Let us write guideliness only…
Don’t the typical GNU-type licenses that would be in question all more or less say: “you can use this material as you like, as long as you properly acknowledge where you got it from”?
I would think this is the implicit attitude of any contribution to the Lab anyway.
@ Urs: More or less, that’s what they say. But there are technicalities. Besides employing lawyers, these technicalities allow people to know that they are allowed to do certain things; this is necessary to be used on Wikipedia. The downside (besides employing lawyers) is that it’s easy to make things more restrictive than you want; what used to be informally allowed becomes formally forbidden.
Toby, you understand these matters: can’t you suggest a reasonable GNU-type license that says more or less just the obvious (“we’d be glad if you make good use of the material we provide, as long as you acknowledge where you got it from”) without having any unwanted side effects? I think if such exists and if it would help people use Lab material elsewhere, then there would be good reason to make use of it.
I think that we possibly need to be a bit more precise on the use of the material now there is such a lot of it. It no longer is the first point of entry to a bit of theory, but more an exposition of the interlacing of various theories and so some guidelines on courteous use (beyond the current ones) may be a good idea.
If we do want to go this route, isn’t it going to be a huge headache trying to track down all previous authors of pages or parts of pages to get them to sign off on a standard license?
That is one reason why my idea would be to use guidelines for courteous use rather than explicit licences.
If we do want to go this route, isn’t it going to be a huge headache trying to track down all previous authors of pages or parts of pages to get them to sign off on a standard license?
But would we have to? Currently there is no formal statement whatsoever, and nobody who ever contributed anything to the nLab can complain (not formally at least) about the material that he or she added being (mis)used elsewhere.
If we add retroactively the tautological kind of GNU license that explicitly says “you may use our material, if you acknowledge us” then this means that the situation of all previous authors is strengthened instead of weakened. Nobody will object if we from now on formally demand that other people acknowledge his or her contributions!
nobody who ever contributed anything to the nLab can complain (not formally at least) about the material that he or she added being (mis)used elsewhere
Formally, yes, they certainly can.
I’m not entirely sure on the law here (and it probably varies a lot between countries), but I think that a pretty good argument can be made that, by contributing material to the nLab, contributors have given permission for its use on the nLab.
However, they certainly have not given permission for its use on Wikipedia! And regardless of how much we may think that we know that they wouldn’t mind, Wikipedia’s own standards of inclusion do not accept our judgement on this matter.
“we’d be glad if you make good use of the material we provide, as long as you acknowledge where you got it from”
Based on Zoran #4, I’m not sure that he would agree with this. (I certainly would, however.)
But suppose that the regulars here are OK with this. The folks at Creative Commons have already written a licence to do this: CC-by, and we should trust their legal expertise over mine. Anything under this licence can be used on Wikipedia, and pretty much anywhere. (The material would be unusable wherever there’s an expectation of originality, so it couldn’t form the bulk of (say) a doctoral dissertation, but otherwise I can’t imagine anywhere that it couldn’t be used.) However, we still could not legally copy most material from Wikipedia.
Now, what about past material? If the regulars (me, Urs, Zoran, Mike, Tim, etc) all agree to release everything that we’ve written under whatever licence we adopt, then that covers many (most?) articles. In other articles, it may cover our modifications (and it certainly covers old versions if a regular started the article). I’m not sure to what extent adopting any licence will cover articles to which a random anonymous stranger has made past edits; for all that I know, a court may rule that editor #2 didn’t have permission to release the document at all, since editor #1 didn’t release their contribution; and even after editor #3’s contribution entirely erases editor #1’s, still editor #2 didn’t actually give permission for reuse.
However, it’s not really courts rule that concern us, but people (such as Wikipedia’s enforcers of copyright violations) who control other publications. Adopting a CC-by licence now for all future contributions may well be enough to bluff them.
PS: I have to go now, and I haven’t really proof-read what I just wrote. I’ll remove this postscript when I have.
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