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 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.

Cropping
Translating
Adapting for another medium
Color correcting

The Creative Commons license condition ND (NoDerivatives) prohibits sharing derivatives of a work. It is still possible to create them, as long as they are not shared.

The new work is independent

Reading media 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.

Media is read from the following services

Finna, the Finnish content aggregator for museums, archives, and libraries. Includes PD, CC-licensed media, and copyrighted media. Media is hosted at the source organizations.
Wikimedia Commons: Images, maps. Includes PD and CC-licensed media media.
Creative Commons Search: Images. Includes PD and CC-licensed media media.
Europeana: Images. Includes PD, CC-licensed media, and copyrighted media. Media is hosted at the source organisations.
Flickr: Images. Includes PD, CC-licensed media, and copyrighted media.

Some scenarios that have not yet been realized

Reading images from Topotheques
Reading excerpts from newspapers or online literary works
Storing user-contributed images in third party services, such as Internet Archive or Google Photos, and using the images in Wikidocumentaries

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
Annotating and identifying people, things or places in the pictures
Commenting the pictures
Tagging the image with available topics
Translating image caption or description

Creating new works based on other works

Saving a Wikidocumentaries search result display

Wikidocumentaries data is displayed in components. One displays people related to the topic while another displays works depicting the topic. The componenents can be viewed in different ways: visual gallery and list views are currently available, timeline and map views will be created. The data and the resulting imagery in the components can be filtered, faceted and sorted.

Data from different components can be displayed together on a map or a timeline or a combination of them. The configuration of these elements can be saved, and the resulting graphic can be exported. Currently, all data and images used in these components are from Wikimedia projects, which makes them unproblematic. What would be the situation be if more sources were added?

Are the components remixes = what materials can be displayed in them?
If they are remixes, are they only problematic when redistributed? Is the configuration data a remix?

A postcard scenario

This tool does not exist yet, but could be created. The user can pick any image and create a postcard of it by cropping the image, altering the colors, adding text and graphics on top. Graphic styles can imitate styles digitized from material shared on the platform.

Which copyright statuses, exceptions or licenses are good for the postcard images?
Is there a difference if the user only creates the postcard, prints it out for herself, or saves it in the system for others to further modify and make use of?
What is the classification of a digitized/extracted graphic style? Is it a derivative or an independent work?

Mapstory

Mapstories have not been realized yet, either. They are narratives that combine still images, text, map views, audio and video. Each frame includes a combination of several mediatypes, and there are transitions between each frame. Good examples of mapstories are these for example.

Are the mapstories remixes or collections?

Mapwarper

The user can pick any scanned map found via Wikidocumentaries and rectify it. The process produces a distorted map image that aligns with a digital world map and can be used as a layer on top of it. The resulting ground control points can be saved and used to distort the original map again.

If the distorted map is not saved, only the resulting ground control points, can a ND license be used?

Wikidocumentaries licensing

Wikidocumentaries itself is a collection that brings together content and tools. Each of the components has their own copyright status, and Wikidocumentaries service has its own. So do the user contributions on the site.

Wikidocumentaries service

Wikidocumentaries license is CC BY 4.0, which covers for example the layouts and the original texts.

User contributions

All user contributions that are considered data, will be licensed with CC0. Any remixes will be licensed with CC BY 4.0.

Translations

The user interface translations are created in translatewiki.net and licensed CC BY 3.0.

Source code

The source code of the user interface is licensed with GNU General Public License.

Conclusions

In order to ensure the compatibility of the source materials for remix, they should be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons before they can be remixed.
There should be a similar normalizing process for user-contributed materials that fall outside the project scope of Wikimedia Commons.
It is useful to display media with restrictive licensing to be able to identify falsely restricted or licensed works.