Conservapedia talk:Copyright

Dual users

As a dual user (and now a dual administrator) of Conservapedia and CreationWiki, I have some questions that I think every registered user of multiple Wikis should ask himself--and here is the best place to put the answers.

What obligations does a dual user labor under?

May a dual user submit content--and by "content" I mean that user's own words--directly to Conservapedia and to another Wiki?

If a dual user has already submitted content to another Wiki--say, CreationWiki--then how long does he have to submit that content to Conservapedia before having to do an extensive rewrite?

How extensive a rewrite would be required to avoid all questions of liability?

In asking these questions, I realize at once that some content requires an extensive rewrite because the "target audience" is not the same, and has different values and, for lack of a better term, needs. But if that situation does not apply, then a dual user might be tempted to submit exactly the same words to both projects. If a user is going to do that, then how many days apart may he do that and still stay within a legal definition of "a simultaneous submission"?

I am glad to have the opportunity to open a discussion on a topic of vital importance to Conservapedia. A firm policy on dual-user rights and obligations will go far to ensure that Conservapedia can get good content submitted to it.--TerryH^Talk 12:15, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

Other Wikis embrace, mistakenly in my opinion, the copyleft approach. We do not. As a dual user, I suggest submitting to Conservapedia first because our copyright is less restrictive than other Wikis. If you submit to other Wikis first, then they might insist that impose the burdensome copyleft conditions on reuse of that material elsewhere. We impose no such requirements.--Aschlafly 13:46, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

• Just on the broader point of comparing it to Wikipedia's license... Differences with Wikipedia and Wikipedia copyright both currently say that contributing material to Wikipedia prevents the author from re-using their work elsewhere. This is manifestly untrue. By U.S. law, authors automatically own the copyright to their work, and the GFDL has no clauses that reassign copyright ownership to anyone else.    If I write a poem all by myself, license it under the GFDL, and post it to Geocities, then I still own the copyright. The same holds for Wikipedia.     Wikipedia authors can and do multiply-license their works under other licenses in addition to the GFDL, which can include licenses that are more restrictive than the GFDL. --Interiot 13:57, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

That's not correct to the extent your work has been edited on other Wikis. I don't know if you are right about your unedited original work and what Wikipedia or other Wikis may require as a condition of submission there. The provisions governing submission on those websites would need to be checked.--Aschlafly 14:09, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

I should think that any contributor who built his contribution on his own machine, or otherwise re-created his original submission prior to any edits, would satisfy the original-submission requirement. Happily, any Wiki has a history section that preserves the source code of every version of every article since its creation, or perhaps fifty edits back. All that a user has to do is look back to how his article looked before anyone else edited it (not counting immediate reverts) and then view and copy the source. I maintain that a contributor who does that, should be able to dual-submit. But I agree--once the article has been edited by another person, it's not that submitter's original work product anymore.--TerryH^Talk 14:16, 6 April 2007 (EDT)