Our friends at Creative Commons have informed the Internets that there’s a very important vote being called at Wikipedia. It’s about licensing Wikipedia under Creative Commons.
This is very important, even if you’re not up on the whole free culture commons creativity stuff, and I will explain why. Currently, Wikipedia is licensed under something called the GFDL, which stands for “GNU Free Documentation License”, where GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”, and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”, and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Ridiculous nomenclature notwithstanding, this license is intended for “free” documents, which can be distributed and reproduced freely. However, it has quite a few quirks which allow it to work very well for software manuals, and not very well for Wikipedia.
“When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist,” says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, and the GFDL was the only thing around back then which seemed like it worked. But it doesn’t. Wikipedian David Gerard notes that, “Even cutting and pasting text between two Wikipedia articles is technically a violation unless the full author list for that piece of text is attached. This is not workable on a wiki.” The Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t been enforcing some of these troublesome rules, but the fact that it’s part of the license is, legally, not great.
So, in other words, Wikipedia needs to switch to a better license, and they’ve found it in CC-BY-SA. Wikimedia, the Free Software Foundation (maintainers of the GFDL), and Creative Commons have all worked together to make it legally possible, under the latest GFDL, for wikis (such as Wikipedia) to switch to CC-BY-SA. Yes, even the GFDL’s creators want Wikipedia to drop it. All that’s left is you.
Yes, you.
Wikipedia is ridiculously democratic, considering it’s by EVERYONE, so the license change isn’t going through unless the majority agrees that it should happen. Which you should. Otherwise you hate America. And kittens.
Now, the title of this post is a bit misleading, because technically this vote is only open to people who have made 25 edits or more to Wikipedia before March 15th of this year. However, every time you fixed a typo or something counts, so if you’ve ever clicked “edit this page” on Wikipedia and actually pressed the “submit” button when you’re done, just log into Wikipedia and go to the voting page to see if you’re eligible. If you are, please vote yes.
Go vote here in case you didn’t catch the link on the last paragraph. Also, here’s another link to the vote page.
What the Hell is Going On With Plankhead.com’s Copyright Notice?
To anyone with a passing knowledge of copyright, Creative Commons, and The Pirate Bay, the new footer for this website is probably extremely confusing.
First, we have the Kopimi symbol, which is Piratbyrån‘s opposite-of-copyright symbol (i.e. you’re allowed to copy this, in fact please do so). This is then immediately followed by the word “Copyright”. And then to further muck things up, a Creative Commons notice.
What? Cognitive dissonance? In my Internets?
Actually, no. This is all easily explained by the third line: “This notice is not an endorsement of intellectual property law.”
You see, I would love it if I could just slap the Kopimi symbol up there and free everything you see here from the prison of copyright just like that. Unfortunately, that’s not how copyright works.
Wikipedia says “Kopimi is similar to the CC0 license created by Creative Commons.” This is inaccurate, and I’d change it if there were a source for me to cite (Which, since I’ve posted this, now there is, but it would look really bad if I changed it myself, so somebody else should go do it). You see, CC0 contains legal language which, to the extent possible under law, legally releases the work in question into the public domain. Kopimi, on the other hand, is a picture, a word, and a not particularly well-explained website. It is not legally binding.
Perhaps this is exactly what Piratbyrån intended: who cares that it’s not legally binding, because we ignore copyright law anyway. I agree with that sentiment. However, I also acknowledge the reality that not everyone is Piratbyrån. Some people would refuse to make use of a free work if it’s still, legally, under traditional copyright. So I need to add some fine print, for their sake.
Thus, first I add the traditional copyright notice, including the internationally recognized word “Copyright”. This is because, for better or for worse, Plankhead does hold copyright on everything here. I don’t have a choice in the matter. That’s the law.
However, instead of saying All Rights Reserved, the next line is a declaration of Creative Commons licensing. Why the Attribution license, and not the aforementioned CC0? Because plagiarism is bad. If there’s any reason why some kind of copyright-ish law should exist, it would be to protect against that.
Of course, I’m not really sure that the legal system should be used to prevent plagiarism. But, again, the people I’m writing this fine print for care about what’s legal and what’s not, so I might as well throw that in there. If you’re a free-spirited pirate, you’re ignoring everything after the big pyramid with the K, anyway.
Speaking of which, why am I using the Kopimi symbol instead of the perfectly good Creative Commons logos? Because to the people who don’t understand copyright law, and don’t read the fine print, Creative Commons has a branding problem. Says Nina Paley:
Kopimi, on the other hand, is a brand without connotations to most people. We have the opportunity to establish it as a “do whatever the hell you want” symbol, because that is, in fact, what it is.
So that’s what’s going on with our copyright notice. The legal language is a necessary evil, but unless you’re a lawyer, ignore it all and do whatever you want. As long as you don’t try to pass off something from Plankhead as your own, it’s all good.