I am reading through these notes, trying to piece together a picture of what the rules/laws are regarding Wikipedia content:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Copyright#Can_I_reuse_Wikipedia's_content_somewhere_else?
I don't have any desire or intention of doing this myself, but I am wondering if I create a site like Wikipedia, which has "freely licensed/usable content", if someone else is going to go ahead and clone my project and slap it under a new domain, change some fonts and colors, slap on a subscription fee and maybe some ads, and try and rank higher on Google Search so they become the dominant provider of my underlying content.
So Wikipedia is a parallel, how does Wikipedia prevent someone from downloading a bulk dump of the whole site, putting it under their own custom domain like freeknowledgefoo.com
, slap some ads around in the pages, and add a subscription fee. Then they maybe redesign a few things slightly (changing fonts and colors), and then for whatever reason they end up ranking higher than Wikipedia itself on Google and end up being used by default instead of Wikipedia. That would be a horrible scenario, which would mean that all the work is put into Wikipedia, but all the money is made by some copycat site.
How does Wikipedia prevent that?
How could I prevent that if I am offering free data dumps of various kinds, but myself have a UI to view the data (like NYC's open data site). So you can download the dump and run the site yourself, or use my precomposed main website hosting and showing the data. How do I prevent users from just deploying my project on their own domain, slightly changing things, and then they run off with the future?
Is this what the "ShareAlike" license is for?
Creative Commons Deed
This is a human-readable summary of the full license below.
You are free:
- to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
- to Remix—to adapt the work
for any purpose, even commercially.
Under the following conditions:
- Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)
- Share Alike—If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.
With the understanding that:
Waiver—Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
Other Rights—In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:
your fair dealing or fair use rights;
the author's moral rights; and
rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
Notice—For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do that is with a link to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
I don't see anything saying you can't do what I describe. But maybe the fact that you have to have "attribution" is the key? I don't quite know how best to approach this situation. On one hand I would like to release data which is free and open source. On the other hand I don't want someone else to then run off with all of it and try and outcompete me with the same product I guess.