Release group secondary type documentation

Inspired by Edit #40369548, I checked the documentation and indeed, “Demo” was not in there.
I added the first paragraph from wikipedia to the mb-wiki just to have something, but ideally there should be some musicbrainz-specific definition.

So: What is a demo in the musicbrainz sense?

It is partly there, see:

Thanks for improving the wiki! Very cool.

Please keep in mind that if you’re pasting copyrighted material into the wiki (which should not be often, and only brief passages), you need to cite your sources.

I added quotation marks and a footnote here.

But again, thanks for improving the wiki!

Oh. Sorry, but even with a source (and even if it had had an actual link to the Wikipedia page – generally a requirement of the CC Attribution clause), this isn’t legal because it’s too verbatim for being fair use, and because the licences used by Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA) and by our wiki (CC-BY-NC-SA) are incompatible. I will therefore revert the changes.

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Oh, interesting. I had assumed that this was fair use, but I’m also fine with erring on the side of caution. Apparently I need to do some reading :grimacing:

I copied the citation from the MLA example at Cite This Page. It’s my understanding that the citation I gave would be adequate in the case of fair use. In the case of reuse under the CC license, I’m not surprised that there are further requirements.

Possibly. But these proposed formats have printed publications in mind, where there are no hyperlinks. :slight_smile:

While I agree with your assessment, I’m a bit amazed how strict your stance is here … while at the same time we (under the CAA umbrella) are very cavalier with the rights of the creators of covers.

Indeed, and my goal would be, to license our documentation under CC-BY-SA. (Yes I am aware, that this is effort that nobody wants to do.) This would solve this case, and there is IMO no need for -NC on this.

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The difference is that any potentially copyrighted materials submitted to the CAA never touch any infrastructure controlled by MetaBrainz - it goes directly to the Internet Archive. So any copyright issues related to the CAA are not the headache of MetaBrainz, so we don’t need to worry about it. The IA will handle it.

Things on the wiki (or in instrument descriptions etc.) are hosted by MetaBrainz, so if an issue arises, it will be MetaBrainz’ headache.

I’m all for it, and have been lobbying against using -NC licences wherever possible (with mixed results; CritiqueBrainz lets reviewers choose -NC, but there is at least a clause allowing MetaBrainz to change the licence).

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I can understand -NC for some uses (although I am personally against it) … but documentation? What’s the worry? That someone makes millions off a „Editing MusicBrainz for Dummies“ book? Free advertising!

I don’t think I have contributed anything worthwhile to the documentation yet, but if I ever do, I hereby state that these contributions are licensed under any CC license that includes an SA condition.

I imagine the idea was more that it’s easier to just have some CC0 stuff and some CC-BY-SA-NC stuff, rather than having every different thing under a different license. I do like -NC and dislike commercial users not having to pay for stuff, but even I agree that docs are probably fine without -NC too.

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So, the license page says

[Contributors] to MusicBrainz should be aware that their contributions
will be made available to the public under the licenses described below.
Furthermore, MusicBrainz users give the MetaBrainz Foundation the right to license this data for commercial use

Does that mean that the wiki (or at least the main namespace) could be transitioned to CC-BY-SA without any further permission from the contributors?

Hmmm … It would mean that if it applied, which seems a bit dubious. That page is mostly explaining the licence for the MusicBrainz database, not the wiki; even though the wiki licence page (now) redirects to it.

It seems this was the original licence page: About MusicBrainz/Wiki License - MusicBrainz Wiki There is no relicensing clause in that text, only a somewhat vague reference to the general MB data licence:

Any user that contributes to the MusicBrainzWiki should be aware that their contributions will be made available to the public under the conditions defined by that license.

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