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Rob Kendrick wrote:
On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 09:30 +0100, David Jones wrote:On 12 Oct 2006, at 04:11, David Burgess wrote:Hi Wiki Maintainers, I wish to use the Wiki tutorials in a commercial product. 1) Can I do this? Does a donation to the Wiki support costs help?My understanding of copyright is that in general you cannot.Copyright is created as soon as a work is penned and in most laws (eg, the UK) copyright can only be transferred by written agreement. That means if I write something and add it to the Wiki then what I wrote is still copyrighted by me. This is true even though generally people don't generally put copyright claims on their contributions, and it's still true even though it's sometimes really hard to track who wrote what.This raises a complex issue: the site itself is hosted in the UK. Does that mean UK copyright law applies, given that's where the data is stored and processed, or does the copyright law of the country where the web browser is being run apply? [snip]
On one hand, the authors have posted the material for general public consumption without the expectation of compensation. On the other hand, the Lua wiki does not have a clear copyright policy like Wikipedia. I can't find a copyright policy on the wiki. Is there one? Or should the wiki adopt one and avoid such issues in the future?
I don't think code snippets are copyrightable; on the gcc list or the binutils list, you are not asked to get an FSF assignment if the patch is trivial. So I think code examples are not copyrightable. As for longer blocks of code, on the SciteScript pages on the wiki, I try to remember to mark my long contributions as public domain code. I don't know about the rest of the wiki.
If I wanted to use the Lua wiki tutorials, I would either do it internally in an organization, or adapt it by rewriting the text and code. If the project is commercial, I think this is a reasonable thing to do, because the status of the material in the wiki is more or less in limbo; pedantic lawyers might not like such things.
-- Cheers, Kein-Hong Man (esq.) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia