User talk:Nicole Sharp/The War of the Worlds (radio drama)
Add topicLatest comment: 3 years ago by PseudoSkull in topic copyright status
- Billinghurst, can you provide a link or citation to your claim that a transcript (written by volunteers of the Wikimedia Foundation) for The Mercury Theatre on the Air: "The War of the Worlds" (1938) would not be in the public domain if the audio file is already in the public domain? The audio file is clearly marked on Wikimedia Commons as belonging to the public domain, and the partial transcript that I copied is transiwikied from English Wikiquote under the English Wikiquote Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. A full transcript of the audio file is needed on Wikisource so that deaf users of Wikimedia Commons can access the public-domain content which is currently available as audio-only. Nicole Sharp (talk) 16:01, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
copyright status
[edit]- The audio file has been available on Wikimedia Commons as a public-domain work since 2017, and also available on English Wikipedia since 2017. The file on Wikimedia Commons was imported from
archive.org, where it is also listed as belonging to the public domain (since 2013). The partial transcript on English Wikiquote looks like it was posted in 2018 by @AdamDeanHall:. Nicole Sharp (talk) 16:58, 28 March 2021 (UTC)https://www.archive.org/details/WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast256kbpshttps://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:War_of_the_Worlds_1938_Radio_broadcast_full.flac&action=historyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)&diff=797020496&oldid=795722283https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama)&action=history
- I am hardly a copyright expert, but I did some googling to see if perhaps the copyright status from Wikimedia Commons and Archive.org could be in error and found some mixed information. According to this site, the audio may still be copyrighted, in which case the content on Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, and Wikipedia should all be removed with the exception of anything under fair use. However, according to this site the original transcript is not copyrighted, even if the audio content might be (which is technically a separate work). Likewise, a volunteer-written transcript of a public-domain audio file would likely be considered a derivative work (and should be eligible for the Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license). Either way, a debate on the copyright status of this work should be moved to a public discussion on Wikimedia Commons (and English Wikiquote). In the mean time, there are broken links on English Wikipedia and English Wikiquote to the deleted page on English Wikisource. I can revert my own edits, but I am waiting for your response to see if your copyright claim is in error or not, and if the audio file on Wikimedia Commons (and all the files derived from it, including the partial transcript from English Wikiquote) should also be removed. I also don't know if I should restore the partial transcript to English Wikiquote (which I deleted when I transwikied it to English Wikisource) if you claim that it is copyrighted. If you can provide a citation for your claim of a copyright status until 2056 for the content on English Wikiquote, that would be helpful. That seems like a very specific number but I don't know where you could have got it from. Nicole Sharp (talk) 16:52, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
- I found this link as well with contact information for the copyright holder as of 2003, but I can't find any citations claiming copyright since it was listed in 2013 as a public-domain work by Archive.org. Nicole Sharp (talk) 17:29, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
- So it looks like maybe the copyright status for the audio file changed in 2018 when the USA Music Modernization Act was passed. The original audio may have been in the public domain from 2013 to 2018, but it may no longer be. If so, "
War of the Worlds 1938 Radio broadcast full.flac," "War of the Worlds 1938 Radio broadcast full.opus", "War-of-the-worlds-broadcast.ogg," "wikiquote:The War of the Worlds (radio drama)#Dialogue," and "The War of the Worlds (radio drama)" should all be deleted, as well as the embedded audio files on a number of Wikimedia projects and any third-party wikis using those files via Instant Commons. The original transcript however may still not be copyrighted, even if the audio file is. Likewise, a new transcript written by Wikimedia volunteers (as a derivative work) might also not be copyrighted. This should probably be moved off of a user page and into a public discussion though to determine the legal status of a volunteer-written transcript of a 1938 radio recording. Could move the discussion on the copyright status of the audio file versus written transcript to the English Wikipedia talkpage to keep it centralized since this involves multiple Wikimedia projects (Commons, Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikipedia). Nicole Sharp (talk) 18:52, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
- @Nicole Sharp: Thanks for the information about the copyright status of the work. It wasn't tagged. I have undeleted, though moved to your user namespace for the moment, though I would like to see how we can get it into the Index: and Page: namespaces where have done the video transcriptions. @PseudoSkull: you have set up videos there, do you see that we can do audio file transcriptions by the same process? — billinghurst sDrewth 02:42, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
- User:ShakespeareFan00 and I have lightly discussed radio shows over on the Discord so they might have something they want to throw in to this discussion. I do want to say that using a similar progress for transcription (using the Ft templates) may be a good idea, but since it will all be narration the only one of those templates that would (presumably) be used is Template:ft/d, the dialogue template. Template:ft would be wrapped within them in most cases to indicate who is speaking.
- I'm not so familiar with radio shows myself, though.
- The unfortunate news I have in terms of the copyright status is that you're probably right (I'm no legal expert on copyright myself), but since the Music Modernization Act was passed I believe that places a copyright even on audio recordings that did not receive a renewal. So this radio broadcast may very well have had its copyright reinstated for this reason. I really, really hope that's not the case as that would be rather sad, but we may have to live with it if it is. I sincerely dislike the MMA, and hopefully the act will be adjusted in the near future (as is implied at c:Template:PD-US-record) to be a bit more reasonable. PseudoSkull (talk) 02:55, 29 March 2021 (UTC)