Please tag this as:

by Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell died in 1970, so this is still under copyright.
http://blog.tatoeba.org/2011/01...d-content.html

I copied this from Wikipedia, abridging the quote where the ellipses are. The Wikipedia article attributes the quotation to page 30 of this book:

Russell, B.W. (1959). Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare. George Allen and Unwin, London. ISBN 0-04-172003-2.

I am citing only a brief extract, as a journalist or reviewer might do. In addition, all Wikipedia text is available under the CC-by-SA licence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi...ported_License

In addition, Tatoeba already contains 96 other quotations attributed as "by Bertrand Russell." Surely they are not also a violation of copyright. In addition, Wikiquote.org has quotations from Russell dated from 1888 up to and including post-1970 (posthumous) publications.

I'm not an expert, so I might be wrong, but the point is that we release our sentences under the CC BY license.
http://tatoeba.org/terms_of_use
So it's certain that you cannot copy anything from Wikipedia.

Trang writes, "CC-BY-SA is not compatible with CC-BY. That means you can't copy text from Wikipedia into Tatoeba."
http://blog.tatoeba.org/2011/01...d-content.html


Wikipedia cites Russel's words as part of an article about brinksmanship, with a proper attribution. This can be probably called a fair use. You added a content which consists only of Russel's words, allowing other people to make money using it. I'm not sure if it's OK. Maybe it is, if Wikiquote is legal.

Maybe it would be OK if you wrote "Bertrand Russell said '...', but I think ...".


There are many questions concerning copyright that no member of Tatoeba can answer. I really wish we could consult a lawyer.

Thanks for your amplified remarks, Tommy San.

I don't see how the brief quote would enable others to make money using it.
Fair use or fair dealing does seem to apply here for the following reasons:
1) Tatoeba seems to have an educational or research purpose
2) The brief quote does not aim in any way to supersede or replace Bertrand Russell's entire book,
3) The ratio of the amount quoted (102 words) to the entire 112-page book is vanishingly small,
4) If the estate of Bertrand Russell perceives there to be a market for the licensing of Russell's works, this market is not damaged by such a brief quote, and
5) Not enough of the original work is cited to enable some potential commercial user of Tatoeba's texts to be able to profit from it.

You might be right, though I think
> 1) Tatoeba seems to have an educational or research purpose
this is irrelevant. No matter what purpose Tatoeba has, we allow people to reuse our sentences for any purpose. I wonder if we have the right to say that you can do whatever you want with Russel's sentences.

Anyway, it would be probably best to follow what our admins say.
http://blog.tatoeba.org/2011/01...d-content.html
http://tatoeba.org/wall/show_me...#message_16842

Otherwise, we should discuss it openly and change the policy of the community if necessary.

Many Tatoeba contributors seem to like to post pithy quotes and epigrams by various authors, especially since they make interesting models for translation into other languages. Tatoeba translators seem to like them as well, because they are often examples of usage by people who have an above-average command of that language.

I'm wondering if it might be possible for our programming team to add three fields into the add-sentences interface and linked to each Tatoeba sentence or group of sentences. These fields would specify (1) the author, (2) the language of the original quote, and (3) the source, usually a book, newspaper or journal. The fields would be empty in the case of user-created sentences or hold a sentinel value which would make the fields non-displayable on the Tatoeba display interface.

But if these new fields did contain information that might help demonstrate a good-faith effort to identify the copyright holder of the full work, the content could be displayed for all users in all language translations — like this, for example:

by: Bertrand Russell
original language: English
from: "Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare". London: 1959. George Allen and Unwin. ISBN 0-04-172003-2.

This would have the advantage that each language translation would not need to be separately tagged (the "by", "original language" and "from" keys could be programmatically displayed in whatever localization a user selected). Consistent quote tagging with all known information as to quote provenance would help demonstrate's Tatoeba's commitment to good faith and to making a reasonable effort to track all copyright claims — as, for instance, editors of literary anthologies do.

> Many Tatoeba contributors seem to like to post pithy quotes and epigrams by various authors

And I'm one of them. Believe me. ☺
http://tatoeba.org/sentences_lists/show/2183/und


> add three fields into the add-sentences interface and linked to each Tatoeba sentence or group of sentences. These fields would specify (1) the author, (2) the language of the original quote, and (3) the source

We definitely need this. I still doubt that we can quote a copyrighted material, but we need it to quote a text released under the CC BY license. Maybe it's better to state the sentence ID of the original instead of just the language. We'll probably also need to show the license of the original and a notice of modifications if any.