[pydotorg-www] Nonprofit Academic Permission Request ::wpmc::10-17250

[Mats Wichmann]

On 04/20/2012 11:31 AM, Jeremy Baron wrote:

> I think the concern was that there might be more than a few copyright
> holders with unclear (or at least not obvious to someone new to the
> site) records about who holds the copyright for which pieces. That
> combined with the lack of a license or copyright grant (but IDK for
> sure that one doesn't exist, just guessing from the thread) means
> there's a lot (potential) of copyright holders to worry about. Even if
> only using a part of the site or a part of the wiki.
> 
> A single copyright holder or a small group of them saying they won't
> sue just applies to whoever said it (not to mention whether it's
> binding); the total number of copyright holders could be far larger
> than the group that made a statement.


Well, the assumption from general practice ought to be that wiki
postings are not protected material, by the nature of wikis as a
collaborative editing tool where anyone with rights to make changes can
change any content at any time. I've just scouted around and most of the
wikis I've looked at do have some sort of disclaimer - sometimes
presented on every page, like "Content is available under Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 License.", some reserving a warning for when you
go into edit mode, like this one:

Please note that all contributions to The Linux Foundation may be
edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you don't want
your writing to be edited mercilessly, 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 (see Project:Copyrights
for details). DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!


We ought to have something wording on the wiki to make things clear for
the future, although there could always be an argument that submissions
before such a disclaimer would not automatically be covered.

I also think people would be likely to treat "mirroring", even if not
done in the classical sense as in this particular case, with a lot of
tolerance: if I submitted to wiki.python.org,  is it a problem if
that site is mirrored as a whole for wider access?  (wiki mirroring is a
little tricky technically though... you really need a dump of the
backing database and to mirror that to be sure you've got it all right,
but that's a rather different story)