Forum:CC BY-SA 4.0

Index → The Panopticon → CC BY-SA 4.0

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If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

Opening post

Are you ready for the trip of a lifetime?

Hey folks! Now that we've settled into our new home, I think it's time to bring up what's been the top priority in my discussion agenda. I'd like to formally propose we upgrade our license from CC BY-SA 3.0 (Unported) to CC BY-SA 4.0. Specifically, the version Wikipedia uses, which adds a clause to waive database rights (which only apply in certain jurisdictions).

For anyone who needs catching up, CC BY-SA is a Share Alike license, which allows other online communities (or private persons) which use that same license — or a more recent version — to use that material, so long as sufficient attribution is given.

What this means for us

CC BY-SA 3.0 is forward compatible with 4.0, but CC BY-SA 4.0 is not backward compatible. This means we are free to upgrade our license, and to continue to adapt/import work from wikis with the 3.0 license (with correct attribution!)...

But wikis still operating on CC BY-SA 3.0 (such as Fandom wikis) will not be able to copy work from us anymore until or unless they upgrade their license as well.

"What? You've never upgraded your license before?"

Apart from some broad accessibility benefits in how the newer license is written more clearly (and translated), there's a couple things we need to explain:

1. The bar for attribution is a little higher. In cases where the full page history is not present (admins can achieve this by importing page histories), you now need to indicate what you've modified from the original material when using an external CC-BY-SA resource.
   • Whenever possible (read: pretty much always), a URL leading to the relevant page history is required. (This contains all the contributors' names, their modifications... and that website's link to their own public license, like we've got in the footer.)
2. There is increased flexibility, legally, in cases where attribution was fumbled on accident by users on our wiki. In the case of insufficient attribution, we will now have 30 days to correct the issue.

By upgrading to 4.0, we're joining Wikipedia in moving forward, not looking back. Waiving database rights means access to use material from Tardis is fair and equal, regardless of governmental jurisdiction. And we'll now be taking that extra step in giving full attribution, like we've always been cautious about, and expecting the same from other communities.

Explaining the upgrade

As mentioned, since our current license is forward compatible, it's perfectly compliant to upgrade to 4.0. Contributions from before the change is officially made will still be licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, but going forward, all new edits will fall under our new license.

We're going to have to be strict about enforcing T:DON'T COPY, of course (and it's recommended everyone actually reads the text of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, which I've only summarised here). Some lenience can also be expected as everyone adjusts to the updated requirements (and for new users, of course), but it's important to correct afterwards once it's pointed out.

Once we give the word to our sysadmins to update the license in the software, and update our disclaimers and copyright page, these new rules and protections will be in effect.

Please ask all your questions below, and an admin (likely Bongo) will get back to you.

Please let us know what you think. This is a really simple step, but a big one nonetheless. These are exciting times to be a Tardis Wiki editor.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 09:55, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

Support

• Sounds good, especially given everything going on back in the domain from whence we left. SilverSunbird ☎ 01:40, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Comments or concerns

My largest concern about this is the higher bar for edit attribution, which will, as I understand it, be significantly higher than it was previously. Take the following hypothetical: Say I wanted to split off Ninth Doctor#Psychological profile into Ninth Doctor/Psychological profile, which is, in fact, a thing which I have been doing erratically every now and then, currently I would only have to link to Ninth Doctor, and by extension the revision history, and say "I copied the edits from here". From my understanding, under the new licence I would have to hunt through the twenty-year revision history to search for every single contributor who edited that section, then list them all in the revision history. This is fairly inconvenient, to say the least.

(Also, I will note it feels a little petty to prevent editors on the Fandom wiki from copying over edits from our wiki; it feels a bit contra to the general spirit of publishing things under CCBYSA in the first place, even if I agree with the general sentiment. However, these are my personal feelings, and have no impact on the actual decision). Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 10:09, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I don't think this is required. If you link to the edit history, it contains all of the contributors to that page, you don't have to hunt down everyone that contributed to that particular section, because it's already in the edit history.

As to your other concern regarding preventing copying by fandom, I share the sentiment, but I think the improved rigour in attribution makes this worth it. Danochy ☎ 10:21, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Oh, okay, so it's just the same as the old one, then? Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 10:23, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia addresses this concern at Wikipedia:Reusing Wikipedia content:

"To re-distribute a text page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)"

So that's not necessary, given page histories. Hope this helps.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 10:27, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, thank you. In that case, I support the notion, although I'm still not quite sure what the difference is between the two versions attribution-wise. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 10:30, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

This page provides a detailed overview of the differences between versions. Specifically, the "detailed attribution comparison chart" clearly shows the differences in how we would attribute. Danochy ☎ 10:35, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 10:38, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Actually, funnily enough, though it's long been common practice, providing a link to a separate page for attribution was only explicitly laid out as compliant in 4.0. There's a number of improvements like that, meaning that the rules are a lot clearer in this version.

Since we're on the subject, I should also note: per WP:NOATT, it is not necessary to provide attribution when copying work that's exclusively your own on the wiki (barring minor/insignificant edits)... nor do you need to provide attribution when rewriting content in your own words.

We will want to lay all this out locally in an updated T:DON'T COPY.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 10:45, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

(Good God I hate this format.) I would recommend everyone read here and here. Not everything is transferrable, but there's a lot there to think about. Najawin ☎ 19:32, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Just to clarify SOTO, if we adopt this, the relevant section at Tardis:Copyrights would change from something like

All material appearing on the Tardis Wiki is available for distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0 (Unported) (CC-BY-SA)

to

All material appearing on the Tardis Wiki is available for distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 4.0 (Unported) (CC-BY-SA), and material contributed prior to (DATE) is also available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0 (Unported) (CC-BY-SA)

Or something like that? Najawin ☎ 04:19, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

That's correct as far as my understanding stretches. Bongo50 ☎ 19:00, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Would we make a note about the nuance here at our notice at the bottom of the site? Najawin ☎ 19:29, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

It would not be required to add it to the footnote, but I'd be inclined to. Bongo50 ☎ 19:59, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

One issue I really do want to highlight are the comments from User:Carlb over at wikipedia, since I think otherwise they'll go undiscussed.

I strongly oppose the use of CC-BY-SA-4.0 or any of the other 4.0 licences for the reasons already expressed in m:Talk:Terms of use/Creative Commons 4.0#General support and opposition back in 2016. The 4.0 licences exist to undermine the rights of authors at a time when the original author's "ownership" of their work is already being undermined by duplicate content penalties. The 4.0 licences contain an ugly loophole which, instead of taking the ability to use the content away from anyone infringing on the terms of the licence, once and for all, instead gives them a thirty-day grace period to say "oh gee, I forgot" and continue business-as-usual without being forced to take the content down. That's a problem because even getting a word with an intellectual property lawyer starts at $300/hr or more. Your opponent wastes a hundred hours of your senior counsel's time with excuses as to why they should be allowed to steal your content, that'll be $30000 please... and most of the garden-variety local lawyers insist that, while they do offer business law, this isn't business law but intellectual property law - some sort of specialised legalistic black art that requires a specialist big-city lawyer to even address. Individual wiki authors can't afford this, and the big for-profit commercial wiki farms who want to steal your content know this. If CC 2.0 or 3.0 required the infringing content be taken down, while 4.0 cynically keeps giving second chances, that's a licence to infringe and steal content. Then there's the "personality rights" issue and the sui generis database question. Once again, 4.0 exists to take rights away from authors. This is the sort of thing which could happen:

• Someone creates a wiki for travel. Clever idea if it makes the data any easier to update when it's outdated and wrong, but travel is a desirable segment for advertisers and two founding members of the project sell the domain for an undisclosed sum (which turns out to be in the $1.4 million range) and the new owner runs the project into the ground. The users, understandably, are dissatisfied so they take their content and go elsewhere. The various CC-SA licences expressly permit this, but instead of complying, the for-profit company launches frivolous lawsuits against the original contributors. I'd presume (and this is hypothetical and not legal advice) that CC 2.0 would allow the takedown of the for-profit site for violating the share-alike provision, while 4.0 would give the alleged infringer an undeserved second chance.
• Someone creates an article about Boy Scouts in a wiki encyclopaedia; a local scoutmaster makes the well-intentioned decision to upload a photo of his/her local scout troop. Someone else, posting at a for-profit wiki farm, decides this image would be great to illustrate an article on a wiki eroticising spanking. The problem should be obvious; maybe the photographer is too stupid to realise that slapping any CC licence on anything is pretty much taken as an open invitation to steal the content and ignore the licence conditions (and the licence doesn't prohibit this conduct in any case) but none of the people appearing in that photo consented to that self-serving commercial use. A group of online trolls threatening to screenshot the whole mess and send it to the commercial wiki farm's advertisers might be able to get the content taken down, but the actual photographic subjects? They get no say, and CC 4.0 makes the problem worse by taking away personality rights. Never mind that the author (the photographer) has no right to waive those rights as they belong to the subject (the people appearing in the photos), it'll be $300+ for every hour of counsel's time to address this when the infringers hide behind this ugly "free" licence. The average boy or girl scout doesn't have that sort of money, even if the motto is "be prepared".
• Someone creates a clever wiki, maybe anything from an "un" encyclopedia as a parody to a fan's collection of star trekking memorability. They host this outside Wikipedia under one of the non-commercial licenses like CC-NC or CC-BY-SA-NC 2 or their variants. Again, whomever owns the domain name goes behind the backs of the community and sells out to a for-profit commercial wiki farm, who runs the project compliantly initially, but gets greedy after a half-dozen years and slips some really nasty text into their site's terms and conditions contracting the wiki farm out of the non-commercial terms of the licence - the big print says "CC-NC" but the fine print slips under the radar. Edit anything and you've just reposted it under an incompatible licence. Very deceptive, but there's a problem... the user who edited that page today isn't the original creator and has no right to waive the CC-NC conditions. Again, this is a big company screwing over a bunch of little, unrepresented authors. Attempt to enforce your rights, expect to be ruined by insane legal fees. After paying a few hundred dollars an hour (and it could take $30000-100000 to bring this to trial, money the victims don't have) do you expect the content to be permanently taken down (as CC-NC 2.0 would have done) or the infringing party merely slapped across the wrist and given thirty days to correct the issue (the CC 4.0 model)?

These aren't hypotheticals. To make matters worse, if the original author attempts to exercise their right to take their content and go elsewhere, the search engine duplicate content penalties will ensure that no one will ever find anything but the infringing version if it is on what was the original domain name. That destroys the right to fork, in all but name.

It's almost as if these people were going out of their way to harm authors by taking away their rights. I have no idea why. Are they being lobbied by the commercial wiki farm sites who think that people like me were put on this earth to be their unpaid employees? Are they merely opposed to all copyright in principle, and see CC as a forum to take this crusade out on the little guys while the big media companies continue "all rights reserved" as business-as-usual, where anything from out-of-print materials to the work of dead authors remains tied up in copyright for decades to come?

I do not consent to my work being relicenced under any of the 4.0 licences. If you do proceed with this, please remove anything I've contributed over the years and any derivative work. Thank you. Carlb (talk) 22:14, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Now, some of these issues are inapplicable to our situation, clearly. But I think there's enough here that we might actually want to discuss, namely, the 30 days issue mentioned, and whether upgrading would make litigation harder and less impactful. Ideally things won't come to that. But. Still. Najawin ☎ 04:43, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

That's kind of disturbing. Obviously, we want to have the licence that works the best for this wiki. Suspending support for now given this new info. SilverSunbird ☎ 05:39, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Personally I'd really like to have a real discussion on this before the new season starts. Najawin ☎ 06:39, 5 May 2024 (UTC)