Re: Quoting W3C Specs on WPD

Sounds mostly pretty reasonable to me. A few queries:

1. "Short quotations from any source" - as in, any W3C spec, or talking more generally?

2. I think something specific needs to be added in to urge the reader to think carefully about what stuff from W3C specs they do quote. I can understand people wanting to quote short bits of explanation of examples to add to a discussion, but not liberally republishing large sections. As you say, these documents aren't really meant for web developers. Should we follow that up with a comment along the lines of "inappropriate or excessive quotations will be removed", or is that too aggressive?

Chris

On 27 Nov 2012, at 16:23, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:

> Hi, folks-
> 
> There have been a few requests to quote W3C specifications on WPD, in light of W3C's document license policy [1].
> 
> We've had some discussions about this in the W3C team, and we're agreed that this is okay, and are working on articulating this clearly.
> 
> Before we go much further internally, I wanted to show you where we are, and get feedback to go forward.
> 
> How does something like this strike you, as a FAQ item?
> 
> [[
> "Can I use text from W3C Specifications on WebPlatform.org"
> 
> Yes.
> 
> W3C Recommendations are licensed under the
> [http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231
> W3C Document License], which permits reproduction in full with attribution.
> 
> Short quotations from any source may be made as fair use. In addition,
> W3C grants permission to include longer direct quotations from W3C
> specifications, under the W3C Document License.
> 
> Images and diagrams from specifications may also be used on the documentation site, with proper attribution.
> 
> To provide attribution, simply add a link to the quoted section of the specification along with your copied quote, like so:
> 
> ((Add example here))
> 
> Web Platform Docs has a [[future_url| link to the W3C copyright notice]], which applies site-wide, so there is no need to include additional copyright information.
> ]]
> 
> Keep in mind that under CC-BY, people will be copying and reusing the content from WPD elsewhere, so whatever solution we come up with needs to take that into account.
> 
> Thoughts? Would this suffice? Do you have any other suggestions or things we missed?
> 
> (On a meta note, I think we need to be careful about quoting from specs, because they aren't really meant for web developers, but for software implementers.)
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231
> 
> Regards-
> -Doug
>

Received on Tuesday, 27 November 2012 16:46:47 UTC