Meatball has a multilevel copyright scheme. We begin by
making minimal claims. Each page can then have a particular
copyright if that's deemed necessary. So, for pages we want
to publish to the outside world, we can simply say the page
is free for use. This works well since a lot of pages that
are under discussion are not suitable for wider dissemination.

Wikipedia has this problem constantly, where they are afraid
someone will take the latest version of an article as given,
so they have created a lot of hard security and bureaucracy
to control the chaos or wabi sabi nature of an open wikis
(which is the wrong answer). If you don't publish everything,
then you don't have pressure to fix things too quickly.

Copyleft is the worst of all worlds, of course, and you
will regret whatever copyleft license you choose since
they are too complicated and incompatible and politically
charged. Pick an open license that is really dead simple
if you must pick one at all.

You really don't want to include people who see the
government as a hard-edged, coercive force as these
people aren't, shall we say, people people.

SS

-----Original Message-----
From: John Abbe [mailto:johnca@...]
Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2004 6:45 AM
To: WikiForum
Subject: [WikiForum] Copyright - why not go free/open?


We're very close to going public with the National Coalition for
Dialogue & Deliberation wiki (no, really :) ; the biggest remaining
non-tech issue is copyright. I see two approaches:

Claim as little copyright as necessary to be functional - WardsWiki,
Meatball.

Inform users they are submitting their words under some free/open
license - WikiPedia, CommunityWiki. (Let's leave aside
viral/non-viral for now.)

At NCDD we want this work to be as widely available as possible. The
reasons i can think of for not going the free/open route:

People's default expectations are probably closer to the first
approach. A big bold sign on the edit page would seem to address this
reasonably well.

Some people may not want to contribute at all if their work is going
to become quasi-public domain. But wouldn't those generally be the
same people who don't want to contribute if their work is going to be
editable?


Help! Why not go free/open?


I'm beginning to think that people's response to this issue has to do
mostly with how they see law in general. If they see it as a purely
coercive, hard-edged thing then not going free/open is supporting
domination and violence. If they see it as (small l) liberal,
community agreement (which perhaps unfortunately is often backed up
by coercion & violence), then not going free/open is just making a
strong request that one be kept informed what's happening with one's
work.

After all, without a free/open license anyone is still free to ask us
for permission to use material; and even with a free/open license i'd
include a request that people let us know what they're doing with it.

Life,
John
--
All you /\/\ John Abbe "Faith is not belief without proof,
need \ / CatHerder but trust without reservation."
is... \/ http://ourpla.net/john/ --Elton Trueblood


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