LoveToKnow 1911 talk:General disclaimer - Comments

From LoveToKnow 1911

"Reproducing Content on another site or redistributing Content is forbidden. Taking Content from this site and editing it and posting it on another site is also forbidden."

I believe this content entered public domain, therefore such restrictions should not be legally possible, and recent US Supreme Court decisions over representing or reformatting public domain material not being copyrightable should apply in this case too. In Great Britain it might be different, but in the US, for instance, still the US laws apply. Why did you make this into a wikipedia? Why would people want to come to this site to engage in modify it in the first place? How can one tell what came from 1911 and what was a 2005 addition? It's either a 1911 encyclopedia, or it's not, what is it now? How can I edit a 1911 encyclopedia? I might be able to edit a 2006 one. Personally, I'd much rather just have a separate access to the 1911 version, because even the 1911 valuable info can get stomped out. For modern stuff wikipedia we already have wikipedia.org, and if you want to start a wikipedia that's in the public domain instead of GFDL, that'd be one thing, but how do you expect people to contribute when you retain copyright to what they provide you? How can you let them even modify something that's not theirs? That sounds like an oxymoron.

"You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part. Framing of this site is forbidden."

At least the GFDL expressly retains the right to modify and distribute, and requires it from derived works too, while public domain is similar to the WTFPL, including right to modify, distribute, AND retain copyright on derived works, but not on the original, of course. How to make money over something that's free? Well, that's a problem that even wikipedia.org hasn't figured out yet, other than selling CD versions, but who buys them? If I want to find something, I google it, and wikipedia it, and I contribute to wikipedia a lot, but there hasn't been much financial exchange between me and google or wikipedia. I do click on google ads and end up buying things, and I asbolutely abhor sites that have ads that flash in my face, pop in my face, or squeeze content down into a swim narrow columb with ads dashing into the already slim column from both left and right, and then there is a "next page" link on the bottom that breaks up the "content" into 5 pages so more ads are loaded at each click, when the original "content" should have fit in a half a page or less. I never spent money as a result of such pages. How to make money by disrespecting your audience, whatever works, right? At least there is a sense of respect coming from wikipedia and google, and even yahoo has some of that left, though not for long. Tomshardware.com totally lost what it once used to have. If there was a public domain wikipedia where derived works were copyrightable, such as you could take the wikipedia entries, and pay experts to review it and certify each published page, then you could release a certified version instead of the last hack available before the next revert that's happening on wikipedia, that'd be some way to make money, that cd-rom version people might be willing to pay for, while you'd be willing to pay the experts. Perhaps you could join up with wikipedia in this instead of fighting each other, and people could always compare the current wikipedia version to the last fully certified one, unfortunately technology might make it too easy to always just look at the last milestone freely online instead of having to buy the copyrighted cdrom that paid experts sweated over. Hiding milestone versions from people? Ugh, I'd so abhor that idea, how could you stop people from not contributing and correcting wikipedia to latest milestone versions and just saying it was the milestone version? I guess someone could play pranks and say their edits revert back to the milestone versions when they really don't, and the only way to be certain about it is to buy the cd, or sign up for an online account to see the paid expert reviewed milestone pages, and then wikipedia or the cd provider underwrites what they tell you, and in case there are other paid-expert reviewing groups, other companies hire their experts and release their own version derived from the common public domain wikipedia, they'd have to underwrite it, and if they lie about it actually being reviewed, they could be sued. Lot of charlatans would just keep releasing unreviewed content claiming it was expert reviewed, and this is where tradition or established trust that a place like Encyclopedia Britannica holds could play to a marketable advantage. You'd still have to be careful not to "hire" gangs of people to shit all over the free pages, making it necessary for everyone to buy the paid version, as a revenue source, because if the free stuff falters and succumbs to becoming a mess, then your experts won't have anything to review. There is a lot of valuable info coming through the free entries of wikipedia, and overall people tend to contribute more and destroy less, other than pranks, what needs to be is the "potential" for the info to be inaccurate, not that it should actually be inaccurate. Even if references can't be traced down, an expert's opinion over whether something sounds true or not is a valuable thing to have, and then he, the expert is the reference, his reputation, which is often worth more than just a link to a webpage or even a scantly reviewed published article somewhere that just presents just as much cooked up stuff as one could personally cook up on wikipedia's pages out of thin air. Of course most people would still just use the free version, and put up with the mess, but for tax supported libraries, schools, or any kind of serious institution who wants its members to have access to a well rounded encyclopedia, the paid version might be valuable, if for nothing else, for not letting 10 year old kids look at entries containing the most recent addition of "Pete's Momma Sucks Joey's fat one tee hee" in the middle of scientific articles, for instance.