[uf-discuss] Re: Voluntary Public Domain declarations now enabled on the wiki

[Manu Sporny]

Rohit Khare wrote:
> Migrating to  a new, clearer copyright regime will not happen overnight
> and must be done clearly and cleanly -- but it begins, I submit, by
> offering to cooperate in the construction of a new regime. Please
> consider joining in by adding the release to you user profiles today...

Rohit, thank you for taking the time to put this together. It is not
only a good start, but demonstrates that key individuals in the
Microformats community are not attempting to do anything nefarious or
shady with what the community produces (like what happened in the case
of XMCD/CDDB).

If you would like to see who has signed up for voluntary public domain
release of their contributions, here's the list:

http://microformats.org/wiki/Category:public_domain_license

We are currently trying to put the hAudio draft into the public domain.

>From a legal standpoint, we would need everybody that made contributions
to that document to not only place the public domain template onto their
user pages, but also explicitly release their past contributions as
public domain works (since they still hold the copyright on the material).

The wording of the current template isn't explicit about past
contributions. The statement could be interpreted as "all future
contributions" since most legal statements are not retroactive unless
explicitly stated.  Please consider adding "retroactively" or "all past,
present and future contributions" to the text. Here is the public domain
agreement with the added changes:

I agree to release my past, present and future text and image
contributions into the public domain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/public_domain). Please be aware that other
contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use pages with my
contributions under public domain terms, please check the other
contributors' user pages. If I do not desire to release my contributions
to the public domain, I will clearly note the copyright policy that
should be used with my contribution.

If this change is not made, we will have to perform the arduous task of
asking every author that contributed to a page to release their
copyright on that page. I have started this process with hAudio, where
we have asked every author of the draft page to release their edits into
the public domain:

http://microformats.org/wiki/audio-info-proposal#Public_Domain_Release

Thoughts and direction in converting old pages would be very welcome.

-- manu