Talk:Copyright strategy

Please don't list copyright issues here. Do that at Copyright strategy/Issues.

On this talk page, you are welcome to add any comments and suggestions regarding the copyright strategy process itself.

In addition to the discussions on-wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation legal team held an IRC office hour on the copyright strategy on September 15 at 14:00 UTC. The logs are available at Copyright strategy/IRC office hour.

Step 3

Hi,

Thanks. The first two steps seem pretty straightforward, and current practice. The third step seems a little blend though, and maybe could use a little more detail. Step 2 and 3 are where the processes get interesting: who do you involve in decision making processes, do you stick to the page you linked, or will you more actively reach out to the policy mailing list and/or the European policy lobby group? If there's a national issue on it, will you actively reach out to local affiliates to weigh in? Or to village pumps of local languages? I suspect the answer to most of these is 'yes'. While the content is quite common sense, it feels a little like a top-down approach which doesn't involve the many stakeholders we have internally. But maybe I'm missing something here. It would be nice to make those efforts explicit. Effeietsanders (talk) 07:54, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

My current thinking is that Step 3's details will depend a lot on each individual issue. There are (and will be) all sorts of issues listed at Copyright strategy/Issues, and the process of addressing them is not the same for each. We want to consult and involve any relevant stakeholders or experts whenever it’s appropriate to do so. Some examples:

• If there’s an issue raised about a proposed change to a national copyright law in France, and the proposed solution is writing something opposing it, we’d want to bring it to the public policy mailing list, speak to the French chapter, and probably specifically reach out to Wikimedians highly involved in EU policy. In such a case it may be that the best approach isn’t for the Foundation to get directly involved at all, and for the chapter and others more local to France to take the lead in addressing the issue. I hope that the organization and discussion of the issue as part of the copyright strategy would facilitate either approach to addressing it.
• If there’s an issue raised (and prioritized) about the accuracy or efficacy of a copyright-related feature in MediaWiki, we’d want to make sure we’ve talked to the Wikimedians who engage with the feature the most (ideally, some of them will have already contributed to the discussion) and we’d want to reach out to the designers and engineers who may be able to change the feature.
• If the best way identified to address an issue is for the WMF legal team to write some guidance on current law to post on Wikilegal, then there would likely be minimal additional consultation from the legal team with community members or groups.

As I hope is becoming clearer, the goal of the copyright strategy is not for the legal team to impose top-down solutions to copyright issues. I think the best solutions will come out of discussions and proposals from a broad range of interested Wikimedians, including affiliates, mailing lists, and Foundation staff. I also think that WMF lawyers don’t need to be involved in every action taken as part of the copyright strategy. The goal is for Wikimedians to find ways they can contribute to addressing copyright issues independently of the WMF legal team as well as in collaboration with us. –Charles M. Roslof (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

I don't doubt your intentions at all. However, given that step 1 and 2 are so much about stating the obvious, I cannot do else but wonder why you don't make the general approach towards involving stakeholders part of this. Right now, it reads like your team taking actions, and only using the single venue as place for possible feedback. Others can 'contribute' but there is no proactive attitude in this process. I know your department has a good name to uphold in the field of reaching out to stakeholders, so that is why it's so striking :) I really think this process could better reflect current practice. If it would be implemented as is, it would be several steps back, I'd think. Effeietsanders (talk) 15:56, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

I hope steps 1 and 2 can improve the organization and coordination of Wikimedia’s copyright efforts. By consolidating these efforts on Copyright strategy/Issues, I think we can take a step forward, making it easier to bring stakeholders to the conversation. The issues page is meant to be a centralized place for discussing issues and planning actions, not to replace other venues for getting feedback or getting copyright-related work done, such as mailing lists or Phabricator. Connecting some of our decentralized conversations will allow for greater collaboration.

I’ve updated the description of step 3 in an attempt to communicate this better. Let me know what you think. –Charles M. Roslof (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Category:Copyright

I suppose you already studied the pages in this category. You could list yourself the issues that are documented and well known. Nemo 15:05, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Well, I think that was done up to a certain extent at least. But documented and well known doesn't necessarily mean current/pressing and still worth solving. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:16, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

On the other hand, the availability of someone to repeat something for the 100th time doesn't necessarily mean that some issue is more current/pressing than another issue which people got tired of talking about. Nemo 07:41, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Strategy

It's worth noting that this isn't really a strategy - it's a planning process that will presumably lead to a strategy. But it's great to see this process starting, and for it to be so community-focused and driven. Nice work! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:04, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

The goal of the copyright strategy is to identify the nature of our challenges, guide how we deal with these issues, and help us make a plan to address them. Yana Welinder started the process internally at the Foundation loosely based on the approach in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, which focuses on strategies that diagnose problems and identify actions. The topics we add here will be closely connected to our plan and day-to-day decisions of course, but we aim to build higher-level guidance, rather than a simple list of projects that will go into our plan. Also, thank you for participating! Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 22:21, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

a note on strategy

In addition to preventing bad things from happening, improving design and user interactions on the site having to do with copyright, and undertaking internal review of copyright policies, I wonder if there are other things the WMF could/should consider. For example, I’ve always thought that supporting the adoption of open licensing policies would be something that the foundation and the movement could be more involved with. Do you think this is aligned with your mission? The WMF has already adopted an open access policy for the research they produce, and fund. Tvol (talk) 21:37, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Supporting open licensing in general is definitely aligned with our mission, and would fit into this copyright strategy. I think advocating for open licensing can also go hand-in-hand with efforts to improve attribution compliance with reuses of Wikimedia-hosted content. I expect that our focus will naturally be more on areas that are connected to the Wikimedia projects, but of course we all benefit when we grow the commons. –Charles M. Roslof (WMF) (talk) 00:11, 15 September 2016 (UTC)