This is the same press release from the union as at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48663861, and the same discussion points apply as there, including the fact that the press release is conflating 'Wikipedia Workers' and 'British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation'. The two are not the same.
This conflation appears to be the fault of the union. Certainly the people who write Wikipedia well know the difference between themselves and the Wikimedia Foundation staff.
I used to work at a call center for a large (fortune 500) company. But that company did not sign my paychecks. It was a shell company with a different name, so that the company could not be held accountable when someone inevitably jumped from the roof.
Since then accountability sinks have stood out to me. I'm going to side with the Union on this one. And plus, unions are good.
Good? They've been a mixed bag in my life. Unions are made up of people and they come with all of the good and bad of people. I watched a union refuse to support a colleague of mine. Why? Because the people in the union were competing against him for resources and they wanted him gone. And they succeeded. I've never really liked unions after that. I suppose I can see some good, but for the most part the union ends up being another branch of management with a few slightly different powers.
If we are going by anecdotes, then I suspect the number and scale of anecdotes of capital misusing it's power are going to vastly outnumber unions doing the same.
> I watched a union refuse to support a colleague of mine. Why? Because the people in the union were competing against him for resources and they wanted him gone. And they succeeded. I've never really liked unions after that
Wait until you see what management does to workers, like fail to pay them on time, give them inhumane working conditions, or fire them arbitrarily.
Sarcasm aside, I've never understood this genre of comment. One second-hand bad experience and you seem opposed to unions for life? Unions are the only way workers can have anything like even footing with management.
I've noticed a lot of Americans have an anti-union sentiment, probably a product of indoctrination.
So, coming with its own pitfalls. How does it feel however with no counter power at all in similar structures, in your own experience?
Seems like a loophole not to employ people. "Editor" sounds like a job title! There is code of conduct, all sort of paperwork, you have to deal with comitees, editorial process... There is non disclosure agreement, you are not allowed to discus internal stuff with people outside from company... wery far from "i seen something was wrong, so i just made quick edit"!
Smells like proper job to me!
We closed the same loophole with uber and doordash employees. Wikimedia should employ its editors!!!
> Smells like proper job to me!
In proper jobs you get paid, and there is someone telling you what to do. Neither of those things apply to Wikipedia.
There is no NDA. The only exception is if you volunteer to join the group that deals with private data (this is not the same as being an Admin, its the step above. Its a very small group)
Comittees exist but are largely optional. If you want to change things at a meta level or do wide coordination, there is no getting around that. But such stuff is optional. You don't need to join any comittees if you just want to write articles.
Now, if you want to say its exploitative (editors put in the labour and get almost none of the created value), then fair point. I would say its no more or less exploitative than your average open source project.
>There is non disclosure agreement
No there is not. You don't have to sign anything to make edits to Wikipedia. On the other hand, these people are full employees with work contracts.
There is like 50 page agreement, you even have to give up your copyright rights! The only way to do it legally in my country, is to hire editor as an employee!!! (Contractors can not legally give up copyright to their work)
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Terms_of_Use
You license your contributions under an open licence. You don't give up your copyright. There would be no other sensible way to operate a collaborative encyclopedia without a license of this kind.
I (lawyer) have never encountered a jurisdiction where a contractor could not license their work under the contract with their employer (the person contracting them).
There are some non-divestable rights out there. Canada (and others) have a copyright concept of moral rights that cannot be given away by contract or, in other words, nobody can ever force someone to give them away. An artist/creator can decide to not exercise them but the artist/creator retains them regardless of contract language.
>> Unlike other IP rights, moral rights cannot be sold or given away. Even in the case of a sale, an author retains their moral rights in the work, unless they choose to waive these rights.
https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canadian-intellectual-prope...
I was thinking about this as they were covering up murals and stadium names for the world cup. Canada doesnt really do that, but canadian stadiums are not generally named after tech companies (ie BC Place got to keep its name).
How is the right non-divestable if you can waive it? More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?
> More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?
Note, the cc-by-sa 4.0 license that wikipedia uses requires you to waive any moral rights to the extent possible. In canada if you are the creator of the work, then you can waive all of them, so its really a moot point. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.en
In general though, moral rights tend to be the sort of thing where they only come into play if you're being an asshole, so it mostly doesn't matter.
It seems to be a somewhat murky area of law. In Europe (and, I guess Canada) you can't really have public domain because of moral rights that you can't waive. IANAL but I've talked with IP lawyers about this and they've been sortof "Yes this is often kinda true." So the broad public domain that is generally true of the US government and which individuals can release in the US isn't really true in Europe as I understand it.
Europe is nearly 50 different jurisdictions, spanning multiple very different legal traditions.
But it is mostly not very murky. Moral rights and commercial rights are distinct in a wide range of jurisdictions. You can generally waive commercial rights, and that is for the most part sufficient for things to e.g. be "functionally" public domain in the ways most people care about.
What moral rights prevent is generally speaking usually things like for someone else to take your work and simply put their name on it, or keeping your name on it but making changes that might do harm to the creator in various ways.
There are nuances between jurisdictions, but it's generally not more difficult than being respectful of the effects (positive or negative) of attribution and integrity of a work.
I don't really disagree. Open source is generally recognized among European states and, from a practical perspective, permissive licenses are mostly indistinguishable from public domain other than preserving notice of the original authorship in some form. A permissive license does allow you to make pretty much any changes you want and sell it or use it in another product (or not).
That's pretty crazy, seems like a ticking time bomb to me. I assume the precise meaning of "moral rights" varies by jurisdiction, but if from the integrity part of the Canadian definition started being broadly applied it would seriously change how things like moderation need to be done. I'm not a lawyer but I wouldn't be comfortable making any kind of modifications to text submitted by a Canadian contributor, even basic stuff like PII redaction. I find the Flight Stop example here pretty chilling https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/michael-snow/key-works/flig...
As I say, a murky area. The MIT license was basically created because the X-Windows folks wanted to release it into the public domain but IBM would have nothing to do with it so the MIT lawyers came up with a permissive license.
https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
What is “X-Windows”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
The Wikipedia article you posted says:
> The term "X-Windows" (in the manner of the subsequently released "Microsoft Windows") is not officially endorsed – with X Consortium release manager Matt Landau stating in 1993, "There is no such thing as 'X Windows' or 'X Window', despite the repeated misuse of the forms by the trade rags"[60] – though it has been in common informal use since early in the history of X[61] and has been used deliberately for provocative effect, for example in the Unix-Haters Handbook.[8]
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Essentially all the distributions are GNU + Linux kernel + a whole bunch of other stuff that tend to have some common elements but vary by distribution. At which point we're into pedantry about what things are called.
And MANY people involved with it and Unix for a very long time routinely use the term, officially endorsed or not. Understandably because it is/was a windowing system and just saying X out of context isn't especially clear.
The only legal way to waive copyright rights, is to hire an employee to produce the work. Individual contributors are not cogs in a machine, employees are!
And if someone produced work for 15 years, and edited 10000 articles... very hard to argue it is not permanent worker!
Wikipedia can easily work as "marketplace of ideas", linking original authors. That is not possible if you have editorial policy, political opinions and work like a corporation or a news paper.
> The only legal way to waive copyright rights
This is generally not true, but more importantly Wikipedia does not ask people to waive their copyright rights, only license it under a creative commons license. Its no different than how open source software works.
A "marketplace of ideas" wikipedia is not wikipedia, that's twitter or maybe reddit. More importantly, your theory of copyright being unwaivable without an employee-employer relationship makes the entire internet unworkable. Nothing could accept user input of any kind unless it can be ruled uncopyrightable.
Just link original author, and do notndestroy their work, even copyleft license wikipedia uses demands that!
Authors and revisions are available in the history tab. Editing an article is permitted by the license.
If editing an article opens you up to copyright lawsuits for "destroying their work", it's completely untenable.
With a moral rights framework, that depends on the content of the edit.
If for example you edit in racist views and leave the attribution of the original author because it’s just a one word change from “the holocaust” to “the alleged holocaust”, then yes you are open to a lawsuit for any harm that results from that malicious edit.
This is especially true with my example as that view would run afoul of criminal statue in many counties.
So that's what I assumed too but it turns out that's not true, at least in Canada. The Flight Stop example was cited as an example of an artist asserting their moral rights to their art to prevent the owner from tying bows around the necks of a his flock of fiberglass geese for the holidays. For art in Canada, modifying it at all prejudices the author. The standard for other works is higher, but still nothing as high as you think.
https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/michael-snow/key-works/flig...
Edit: I also wonder how or if this works in reverse, if someone wrote a fantastic article on numerology or whatever with a screed halfway through, would removing it from the article violate their moral rights? I think any framework where the answer is no is also probably going to be unworkable.
Have you ever read the ToS/ToU of any social media site? Did you know that by using this site you've agreed to arbitration? https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou
Giving up copyright when you write an article for Wikipedia is literally the only way it could possibly work. The biggest issue Wikimedia has is its full time staff, followed by full time editors.
There is no copyright assignment on wikipedia. You are required to license your work under CC-BY-SA 4.0, so the WMF can distribute it, and other editors can reuse and modify it.
More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
Social media is different from wikipedia. If i write my opinions here, it is not an opinion of ycombinator. If I write stuff on wikipedia, it is opinion of wikipedia and there is rigorous editorial process, to get my stuff published...
Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!
Platform vs publisher...
> If I write stuff on wikipedia, it is opinion of wikipedia
That's obviously false, if for no other reason than:
> and there is rigorous editorial process, to get my stuff published...
There are people who will see and review your work after the fact, but it's published immediately.
> Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!
There's a link at the top of every page to see who wrote what text.
British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation United doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
I suspect its just because naming things concisely is hard.
I don't think it comes from the union, Wikimedia has always gone out of it's way to conflate the people who are creating, editing, and maintaining website Wikipedia and the leeches who captured that effort.
There's a union of wikipedia editors being formed and they are in alliance with the US and UK Wikimedia union. More public statements will follow in the next weeks about this.
What are the legal protections for collectively bargaining as non-employees with a corporation, if any?
It seems like there wouldn't be (and shouldn't be) any.
Different legal systems have options for groups organizing to do a join litigation e.g. England and Wales have Group Litigation Orders.
I'm not a lawyer and not in England or Wales! ;-)
Oh boy here we go
Very exciting good luck to them all