Talk:Oregon City, Oregon/archive

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Re the following: Copyright (C) 2002 Bryce Harrington. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

What part of this is copyrighted? There was material there before the copyright notice was included. Much of the material was added by the city and state bot. If we're going to include copyright notices we need to indicate which PARTS are copyrighted? -- Zoe

Originally there was an invalid copyright notice (which was changed). I removed the notice from the article since it is redundant. It has been made clear that no one "owns" Wikipedia. I asked Bryce to change the notice to make it at least compatible when I wanted to add to it. -- Ram-Man

It is a fantasy to put any sort of copyright notice on utterly mundane information such as this. There are thousands of articles in the Wikipedia, better written, with much more research and original information, that are not copyrighted in this banal fashion. If there is anything left in this article that someone imagines to be copyrighted, please let me know what it is and I will gladly replace it with original material with no copyright. Ortolan88

? Sorry to be pedantic but everything submitted to Wikipedia that is the original work of the contributor is under copyright: The GNU FDL with the author retaining copyright. --mav

Intellectual property law reminds me of Lord Buckley's description of the bear dance,

And he got up and started to do The Bear Dance.
Two sniffs, three snorts, a half a turn and one grunt.
And I'm trying' to do it, but I couldn't do it
'cause it was just like a jitterbug dance,
it was so simple it evaded me.

Ortolan88

I just say remove the notice. The notice by Bryce was originally inconsistent with Wikipedia but no longer. As I see it, just delete it. -- RM

I agree. It is redundant and is counter to our custom of not including sigs in articles. That is what the history is for. --mav

Ed Poor says: Let's remember what it says below the "Save page" button:

"Please note that all contributions to Wikipedia are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see Wikipedia:Copyrights for details). If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here."

No previously posted putatively protected factoids were used in the recent edits to this page. All original research. Ortolan88 19:03 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)

The original material was contributed explicitly under the GFDL, which means it is safe to be used under the policies and terms of the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia requires that all materials be copyrighted by the author, or have permission for use, and be covered by the GFDL license. I simply stated explicitly what is already implicit.

There appears to be some misunderstanding regarding licensing and copyrights here. Licenses and copyrights are two different, orthogonal things. Legally, ALL material written by authors is by default copyrighted by them, unless they either explicitly state it is in the public domain, or formally sign it over to a legally registered organization (such as GNU or FSF). Often, "copyright" is used to inhibit sharing of information and to restrict the ability to make changes and re-share it, and thus it is understandable how people view it as a negative (or even evil) thing.

An "open source" style license such as the GPL or GFDL, is crafted in such a way as to use copyright against itself. That is, the license grants back the rights that are generally taken *away* by copyrights. For this reason, the practice of including a copyright statement and license grant such as the one I used is called "copylefting".

Of course, one will recognize that if the entire document - including the copylefting statement - is allowed to be modified, then what is to prevent someone from simply deleting the copylefting statement? This is why in copylefting one often says something like "anything can be changed except this license grant". I believe this is one of the reasons that the GFDL includes provision for invarient sections, and is the reason I used it in this case.

I don't believe that the original licensing statement was invalid. In fact, the reason I did it was to bring awareness to this issue, as a sort of example to make people think more about what is legally required in order to protect both wikipedia and the contributing authors under the GFDL.

The reason I removed the "invarient" clause was simply because I did not wish to see this devolve nuttiness, not because I agreed with the editor's assertion. As someone else pointed out, this was a short article and not really worth the stress and time to explain. I assumed if I removed the clause that was scaring people, then that would be that. I didn't imagine that someone would be so brazen as to remove the copyright entirely.

I know and understand that many people are of the philosophy that all information should be authorless and therefore unowned and, presumably, ownerless. It can certainly be said with confidence that the copyright system has been abused almost to the point of worthlessness. But one should not deny the fact that even if it is complicated and confusing to you, copyright law *is* law. But even more importantly, one needs to understand the whole premise of open source, and how it uses copylefting to directly use the law to subvert the law.

Deletion of my copyright statement on the article is in error, and not legally permissable. Please read section 2 of the GFDL. It is quite explicit that these *must* be retained in order for the material to be legally used. In fact, you all would do well to review the Wikipedia:Copyrights page. If there is any uncertainty or lack of clarity, I would encourage you to write to RMS and ask for the clarification directly. Heck, maybe it's me who is misunderstanding the licensing terms after all, even though it looks pretty darn explicit.

Let me be clear - you guys are *way* overreacting.  ;-) I was simply trying to make a point about the importance of including copylefting statements, and to hopefully bring better awareness of Wikipedia's written policies on the subject. The assertion that my contributions were "mundane" and that I don't "deserve" to hold my copyright is disingenious. The statement that "it will be rewritten to not have copyrighted material" is in error - all material, even the stuff written to replace mine, is by default copyrighted. The difference is that now it is ambiguous and indeterminate as to who the copyright is owned by; some may view that as a plus, I suppose, but it's not legal, and provides Wikipedia with less traceability and copyright protection than if it were explicitly stated.

Since the copyright statement that the material had been submitted under was removed, that action made it impermissable for Wikipedia to use it; I have thus removed the material. I have to say I'm rather stunned to learn it is common practice to delete these statements - is it even legal to do that? Wow. You guys ought to doublecheck with RMS on that.

This is actually "experiment #2". The first was a much longer article titled "Manifest Destiny". I had used the same copyright statement, and it came to the attention of LDC. After a long and productive discussion about this and about the effect it had on Wikipedia's future, LDC agreed that it was important for Wikipedia to properly manage this information. We agreed that it would be superior for the software to manage these notices instead of having to embed them in the page itself. He committed to making the software changes to do this, and we agreed that the copylefting could then be moved there. Unfortunately, this has not been done, and instead someone simply deleted my copylefting there anyway (which is kind of exasperating). The talk page of Manifest Destiny contains a summary of the compromise that had been reached. LDC is very knowledgeable in IP law and is in fact a strong opponent to the whole idea of copyrights and information ownership, and tends to prefer things be in the public domain, so the fact that we reached the compromise that we did suggests to me that the point I am making here is correct and worth more consideration than it is being given.

The assertion that the original copylefting was inconsistent with Wikipedia is not correct; in fact quite the opposite - it stated explicitly what is normally implicit anyway. I find it rather humorous that people find it scary to see the terms under which they are already submitting material stated clearly on someone else's page.  ;-)

Similarly, calling the material "putatively protected" is nutty. It's the _same terms_ that everything else is covered under, and is no differently protected, except perhaps more clearly.

The statement that a copylefting statement is "merely a sig" kind of misses the entire point. I do believe that you should allow authors to put their names to their work; to me it seems this would encourage them to strive for higher quality and do better research. But that's a whole other line of argument, better made in a different way.


I had hoped in doing this that it would engender a positive discussion about the topic of author attributions and license grant statements, with the hopes of helping Wikipedia better deal with the careful copyrighting of its material. I had expected a little acrimony, since that's sort of the 'norm' for Wikipedia these days (unfortunately). But this interaction has felt very aggressively impolite and disrespectful. Instead of asking me why it was done, and given time to have my say, I was ordered to "adapt or else", and then when I obeyed (even though I believe I was following the rules to the letter), I still got the "or else".

I don't care whether or not I have a copylefting or my name on this particular article. What I do care about is that the need for copylefting and retention of author attribution and explicit license grant not be ignored. And something I care even more deeply about is that editors treat authors fairly and with some respect, because if that is not possible, how can the project retain good contributors?

-- BryceHarrington (bryce at neptune.net)

Okay, I agree, I am an impolite nut who knows nothing about copyright law, but I don't think you ought to have your name on a contribution to Wikipedia because the whole idea, which I assume you do understand, is not that the information is not copyright, but that each article is fair game for improvement. Were we supposed to add the name of the fellow who put in the population statistics? Then add my name when I came across the fascinating bit about the water-powered public elevator? Then someone else who comes along and clarifies the confusing geography of Oregon City? (How do the two rivers, the falls, the locks, and the elevator all fit together?)
I have come to see that your effort had a serious basis, but the fact is you were angling to get your byline on a basically trivial set of sentences and to keep it there permanently no matter what happened to the article in the future. Excuse me for laughing.
In the past 24 hours, 5 people have contributed to the article on jelly beans. Should all their names go on there? You say "editors" should treat "authors" with respect. Who is the editor and who is the author here? I don't see that you have any more claim to this article than I do. I started English plural and put considerably more original thought into it than you put into Oregon City, Oregon. Since then, 25 other people have chimed in to make it one of the most complete articles in the whole Wikipedia. Not one of us has claimed any rights to this work and most of us don't even have our legal names on the History list.
Well, since my friend and I started the article on jelly beans, yes, I do think our names should be there. It's ours, dammit, all ours!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Soon ALL will be ours and we shall make you puny mortals pay!!!! --Dante Alighieri


This discussion and the discussion at Talk:Hitler has only got one ball have only served to convince me that strict interpretations of copyright and copyleft law are part of a conspiracy that if permitted to prevail will end in the death of Wikipedia. It strikes me as ironic in the worst possible way that the copyleft can be used in this pernicious manner.
By the way, I am a professional writer with millions of words under copyright to me or my various employers. I am providing my valuable services free to Wikipedia while at the same time I have a book proposal in circulation for which I will claim the copyright and make, no doubt, lots of money. Tom Parmenter, better known here as Ortolan88 15:00 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC) P.S., one more word spellcheck.
P.P.S., to further demonstrate my unfitness to engage in such lofty discussions, I propose that Wikipedia declare all content Public Domain and restrict itself to protecting vigorously a Wikipedia trademark and thereby drop out of the whole copyright/left conspiracy. Ortolan88

I'm going to delete everything this nut contributes, unless he drops this stupid copyright thing. (Not you, Ortolan, the other guy). If he is quoting from his own copyrighted work, that's fine. We'll take a fair use quote, and he can send Jimbo a letter of release to that effect, which he'll keep on file somewhere.

But if he's releasing his contribution under the GNU Free Documentation License, then no special notice is required. Submitting the text is all the legal record he'll ever need to ensure that the entire world will get the benefit of reading and changing his stirling prose.

In short, give it to us and we'll keep it safe. Or don't give it to us at all, buddy. --Ed Poor

Bryce is not a nut. He just believes that our statement on the Edit Page:

Please note that all contributions to Wikipedia are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see Wikipedia:Copyrights for details). If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, 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. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

is not sufficient to guarantee that published pages are actually under the GNU FDL. I and most others disagree, but we now have an automatic short FDL notice under articles, which should satisfy Bryce. --Eloquence 16:50 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Are we sure we want to censor/delete someone's articles, which seem like useful content to me (whether they "put considerably more original thought into it" or not seems irrelevant and a bit over the top) just because there is disagreement on the redundancy of listing Wikipedia's policy on the article?

"I'm going to delete everything this nut contributes" sounds a bit like censorship to me, and contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia.

Of note: To legally use Wikipedia materials, you must "you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B [of the GFDL])". Is it possible that this is the reason that Bryce wants his name on the piece, and not for some self-gratification purpose? And perhaps it IS his intention to list everyone that contributes (editors seeming to be everyone who works on the article after the initial post), as well as to have the work revised. The copywright statement isn't to keep people from editing the text, but rather to give permission to use it legally.

I understand that he was trying to make a point.
I didn't delete anything or advocate deleting anything. My name here deleted his own contribution to the article because he was unhappy at the reaction and then I replaced the missing stuff with fresh material.
I object strongly to putting bylines on articles and I doubly, triply, and so forth object to a list of contributors. This sort of thing is what makes me think that GFDL absolutism is objectively a troll and a danger to the Wikipedia. The person who makes the first attempt at an article often sees the entire contribution disappear by the time the process is through with it. Should their name be left hanging at the bottom of an article as a memorial?
We are about 80,000 articles behind on tacking on a bunch of names, most of which we don't even know, to a bunch of articles that the owners of those names have already indicated they have no interest in claiming credit beyond the History and whatever they might put on their own user pages. In my eight or so months here, bylines have always been deleted from articles. This is one more. Ortolan88 22:27 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
Ortolan, I agree that listing all people who worked on an article shouldn't be necessary. There is, after all, the revision history. This is not an FDL issue, though. If the content was PD, the exact same argument could be made: that for the entire content to be PD, every contributor would have to visibly acknowledge its public domain status. Bryce is right: Everything is copyrighted by default. Whether you want to PD or FDL it doesn't matter -- if you want to change the default status, you have to declare that you did that. With our FDL notice on the edit form and the FDL notice at the bottom of articles, I believe we fulfill all legal requirements reasonably well. Copyright doesn't really deal with collaborative editing well, though, so lawyers could probably argue in circles about it. --Eloquence 23:06 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Granted Ortolan did not state deleting his articles. That was stated by Ed Poor "I'm going to delete everything this nut contributes", and that is something I don't agree with, whatever the decision is made on the whole GFDL, name tracking, whatever issue.

It is reassuring that people are so concerned with copywright law, whatever way they feel that it should be applied, or not applied.

Don't mind Ed, he's strange like that sometimes ;-)

Despite the claim that adding an invariant section is ok, the Wikipedia:Copyrights page clearly states that anything in Wikipedia must have *no* invariant sections. Of course you can copy the databases and publish them yourselves with whatever invariant sections you want, but you implicitly agree to not have invariant sections when you add to Wikipedia. Maybe wikipedia should have some sort of page which lists the contributor's names so it has them all. -- Ram-Man

Ed, Bryce isn't a nut. He was one of Wikipedia's most active contributors in the first few months of its existence, and I'm very pleased to see him back. He is, however, forcing some valid issues about the GFDL that have been making me nervous for a long time. The GFDL is very strict on keeping track of authorship, and I don't think most Wikipedians understand it very well. Take a look at the GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.1.html), section 4: Modifications. According to the license, to modify a GFDL document we need a title page, a list of the original authors, a list of the modifying authors, and a completely different title unless explict permission is given by the original authors to use the same title. We also need to perserve all copyright notices, and add our own after it. Some people might argue that every article in Wikipedia is a separate document, and thus these requirements apply. In short, the GFDL was designed for software documentation with authors, not for a collorbative effort like Wikipedia. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:45 Nov 27, 2002 (UTC)

I don't see the problem, a list of all the authors is stored in history, and on the title issue reread the section as it does not say _explicit permission_ so we can pretty much assume an implicit licence. On the copyright issue we can fix that by automatically attaching a copyright notice next to the user name on the history page. --Imran 01:41 Nov 27, 2002 (UTC)
We won't be able to come up with that list (and I'm betting Linux couldn't either), so we have to fix the GFDL then. Let's be pioneers, rather than strangle the Wikipedia because Stallman forgot something.Ortolan88
It makes for some muddled legal and licensing issues though. -- Ram-Man
Unfortunately, "fixing" the FDL (it's not broken for its purpose) is not that easy, as we already have >90000 articles licensed under it, and any change of license legally requires all copyright holders to agree. Really, we are on shaky legal ground anyway, as copyright and European copying rights vary a lot in what rights you can and cannot transfer. Even the public domain can get extremely complicated (when does a public domain work become non-PD again after it is being mixed with non-PD content? etc. Some people actually claim copyright for reproductions of public domain content, like photos of ancient frescoes.). Copyright is a braindead legal construct, and we have to rely on much guessing and goodwill to make it work (or rather, not work ;-) for us. In cases where the FDL requires permission to circumvent certain restrictions, such as on the title page, I think we can ask for this permission or imply it on the edit page. --Eloquence 01:16 Nov 27, 2002 (UTC)
Given that Wikipedia is the largest user of the GNU FDL outside of the FSF, it shouldn't be too hard to lean on the FSF to modify version 1.3 of the GNU FDL to clear up any of the problems we have. --Imran 01:41 Nov 27, 2002 (UTC)
OK, you argue with Stallman ;-). Anyway, this wouldn't solve our problems, as we need to get all our users to agree to relicense their content under the new version, which seems impractical.­--Eloquence
Actually we don't, the wikipedia copyrights page states "Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the text of all Wikipedia articles under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation" --Imran 02:00 Nov 27, 2002 (UTC)
Uh-oh, statements like this are always legally problematic because of their breadth. Anyway, if you think we have any chance to make significant changes to the FDL that would benefit us, go for it. --Eloquence

Well I have no issue with agreeing to release all my work (that's at least 30,000 articles) with no requirements for any credit whatsoever. In fact I want no credit for my mistakes ;-) -- Ram-Man

That's great, but what do we do with our 5667 other registered users? --Eloquence
That's just begging for a funny response... not from me, mind you, but still... ;) --Dante Alighieri

Girls Basketball

The Oregon City High School girls basketball team, is a naional power, and might be worth noting. They won 3 consecutive national championships in the mide-90's and 14 state titles. Just a suggesion.