Licensing

Welcome to view an exercise of the many ways of remixing content in Wikidocumentaries and how to license them!

What is this?

What is Wikidocumentaries?

Wikidocumentaries is a maker space for citizen historians. It collects data and content from openly licensed outlets around the world about any topic – people, places, buildings, events and more. The topics cover everything that Wikipedia does, and it is possible to add even more personal, local, or generally less recognized historical topics to Wikidocumentaries.

Wikidocumentaries is made not only for exploration but for reusing the materials that are found in it. It is possible to annotate, correct data, locate and indentify, or use the materials as part of further works. Wikidocumentaries will provide functions and tools for this work.

What is this page?

This is an overview of the licensing issues related to existing and imagined reuse opportunities provided by the site. This page is created as an exercise in the Creative Commons Certificates program, but it will remain as an overview and reference chart for guiding our reuse practices.

If you have ideas or questions related to this exercise, please add them to the talk page. (Unfortunately joining the wiki is still a bit of a pain, but please give it a try! You can also mail wikidocumentaries@gmail.com or use any of the other comms methods mentioned in the menu at the bottom of the page.)

Basic reuse scenarios

In order to specify the licensing conditions for each type of use, we must be clear on the basic concepts affecting copyright and licensing.

Collection

When a work is displayed as part of a collection unchanged, the reuse is not considered an adaptation, a remix or a derivative work.

In Wikidocumentaries we are interacting with several layers or collections, which may at first sound complicated. Images are released by museums, archives and libraries from their collections. At this stage they enter the collections of the aggregators. When Wikidocumentaries reads those images they become part of Wikidocumentaries collections.

None of these transitions changes the images or their copyright status. Wikidocumentaries displays the images along with the attribution to the original creators. Out of courtesy, Wikidocumentaries also displays the originating institution and the aggregator.

One thing to note is that often the data about the media, the metadata, can vary between the originating institution, the aggregator and Wikidocumentaries. In fact, images generally have (at least) two layers of copyright: one for the image and another for the metadata. Many aggregators now require that the metadata of their partnering institutions must be in CC0 to allow the aggregators to clean and format the metadata without additional contracts.

Derivative work/adaptation/remix

A derivative work – it can also be called an adaptation or a remix – is created when one or more works are altered in a way that creates a new work. Derivative works are also created when works are translated, or adapted from one medium to the other, for example when creating a film out of a book.

In order for the resulting work to be protected by copyright, a level of originality must be presented, and the level varies by jurisdiction.

Reading images to Wikidocumentaries

Wikidocumentaries displays materials from several outlets. These outlets are content aggregators that gather and display material from other organisations. All the source images have their individual copyright status and licenses. Currently Wikidocumentaries only reads media that is compatible with Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA or more open). With more detailed control we could display more content but limit reuse of the content if the licenses do not allow that.

Images are currently read from the following services

• Finna, the Finnish content aggregator for museums, archives, and libraries
• Wikimedia Commons: Images, maps
• Creative Commons Search: Images
• Europeana: Images
• Flickr: Images

Other outlets and scenarios to consider

• Ajapaik
• Topotheques

Displaying and distributing

• Displaying the images on a topic page
• Viewing the image metadata
• Uploading an image to Wikimedia Commons
• Downloading an image

Enriching the images

• Adding or changing the location an image was shot in
• Identifying people, things or places in the pictures
• Commenting the pictures
• Tagging the image with available topics
• Translating image caption or desription

Creating new works based on the images

• Creating postcards by cropping the image and adding text on top of the picture
• Using the images in a mapstory
• Rectifying maps

Wikidocumentaries licensing

• User contributions
• User interface translations
• The service

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