Copyright waive form for sentence collection

Common Voice
#1

Would this copyright waive form for sentence collection be acceptable:

Я, _________________________________________, являющийся автором и правообладателем созданного моим творческим трудом произведения, идентифицированного в нижеприведенной таблице, настоящим выражаю согласие и предоставляю на безвозмездных (бесплатных) условиях для проекта Common Voice и проекта Mozilla, а также для иных лиц (общество, мировое сообщество, публика) право использовать мое произведение для публичного распространения, воспроизводить произведение; импортировать экземпляры произведения в целях распространения; переводить произведение; публиковать часть моего произведения по всему миру в открытом доступе с целью общего неограниченного доступа и общественного достояния.
Я разрешаю осуществлять вышеуказанные права в отношении моего произведения без дополнительного последующего согласования со мной.
Используемая часть моего произведения должна соответствовать следующим условиям:
1. предложение из текста моего произведения должно быть не длиннее 14-и слов.
2. количество предложений, которое разрешено использовать, будет показано ниже в таблице.

ТАБЛИЦА

  • Название работы
  • Тип работы / Дата публикации
  • Количество разрешенных предложений
  • ФИО автора
  • Номер телефона автора
  • Эл. адрес автора
  • Подпись автора
  • Дата подписания
#2

Can you help us understand the text and where is this coming from? :slight_smile:

Thanks!

#3

The text is coming from our lawyer at the Abkhazian language committee.
The text could be translated as follow:

I, _________________________________________, being the author and copyright holder of the work created, identified in the table below, I hereby consent and grant the right to use my work for public distribution on gratuitous (free of charge) terms for the Common Voice project and the Mozilla project, as well as for other persons (society, world community, public) the right to use my work for public distribution, to reproduce the work; to import copies of the work for distribution; to translate the work; publish part of my work worldwide in the public domain for the purpose of General unrestricted access and the public domain.
I authorize the exercise of the above rights with respect to my work without further consultation with me.
The part of my work used must correspond to the following:

  1. the sentence from the text of my work should not be longer than 14 words.
  2. the number of sentences that are allowed to be used will be shown in the table below.

TABLE

  • Work title
  • Type of work / date of publication
  • Number of allowed sentences
  • Author’s name
  • Author’s phone number
  • Author’s e-mail address
  • Author’s signature
  • Date of signing
#4

Where do you need this?

I mean, people contributing to the sentence collector have to already check they share the content under public domain, there is no need for a legal form for people to sign.

Can you help me understand the situation better, what are you trying to solve and why?

Thanks!

#5

@nukeador, the purpose here seems to be to increase the availability of modern content by getting authors to release a limited number of sentences to the public domain. As written, this would be problematic for Mozilla since you have no way of knowing whether what appears to be copyrighted modern content is actually OK. And while the number of sentences is restricted, permission is apparently being granted to the whole world. That could easily mean that person A extracts and uploads the permitted number and person B - acting in good faith under the same permission - does a different extraction and uploads the same number again. It would be better for each author to list which specific sentences are being released to the public domain. Then, those and only only those can be used.

#6

Yeah, I don’t want to make any legal considerations because I’m not an expert. I’ll try to understand the problem space (what are we trying to solve) and then we can see if legal advise needs to be requested.

#7

@Michael_Maggs, I would not want to specify the sentences beforehand, I’m not with that strategy.
I prefer to have the freedom to pick and choose, once the sentences are committed to Common Voice, reviewed and approved then they become in the public domain.

#8

@daniel.abzakh, obviously this is all for Mozilla’s lawyers to comment on, but I doubt they’ll be happy with that. If you define sentences as being in the public domain only after they’ve been uploaded, read and approved then by definition you’ll be uploading and working with copyrighted material. That’s not consistent with the rule that everything uploaded has to be in the public domain.

#9

@daniel.abzakh can you help me understand what is the problem we are trying to solve here and how is that affecting you or your community?

Thanks!

#10

@nukeador @Michael_Maggs
The problem is that we need a lot of CC0 texts, I want to be able to approach book authors and ask for text donations, if I ask someone to donate the whole book of his/hers, they will most likely say no. So I want to motivate them to donate a portion. Later I get to pick that portion.

The problem here is similar to the Wikipedia situation; we are allowed to use 3 Wikipedia sentences per article as a fair use, if person A and person B pick 3 different texts from the same article from Wikipedia, Common Voice gets 6 sentences from that article, how would you solve that problem? because I think my problem is similar.

#11

The wikipedia extraction will be handled by one tool run by Mozilla staff.

We won’t accept sentences from individuals coming from wikipedia but we will work with communities to come up with per-language rules to get quality sentences in their languages.

This way we have control over what the script is extracting and how. We would like to explore with communities what other big sources we can do a legal review to run a similar legal approach.

#12

For the time being unless there is a solution to make donated portions generic, I think I will make it clear and define the donated portion from a book beforehand in the copyright waive form.
This is probably the easiest solution, I will follow your advice @Michael_Maggs