h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a ?
A: A only sucks blood at night.

If you laid all of the lawyers in the world, end to end, on the equator, it would be a good idea to just leave them there.



I know it's bad manners to at your own jokes, but let's face it, nobody else will...

Anywho - deidzoeb, you are entirely correct: the law is overcomplicated and often highly stupid. That's something that's possibly above the BBC's ability to change though, so it is possibly off topic...

No, it's not off-topic. It's fundamental to this topic. The House Rules and T&C are there for the researchers to understand our limits on h2g2 (and to protect BBC in case of lawsuits). We have to understand the House Rules and T&C, because we can't be expected to sign our agreement to rules we can't understand. We have to become amateur lawyers and understand 100-word run-on sentences such as: "Where you are invited to submit any contribution to this site (including without limitation any text, graphics, video or audio) you are required by such submission to grant the BBC a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicenseable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, play, and exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to any such work worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any media now known or later developed for the full term of any rights that may exist in such content, consistent with privacy restrictions set forth in the BBC's Privacy Policy." (Note that this sentence also contains a link to the BBC's Privacy Policy. The old world of paper used small print to confuse people. On the web, the small print is just a hyperlink to some other page, not even on the same page you're signing. The small print is so small, it's not even there unless you click through to it.) Yet in the end, no matter how much we laypeople think we understand the law of the land set down by BBC legal, it won't help us argue against them advising the h2g2 staff to remove m2m2's blacklist page, and h2g2 staff admitting that they might have to ADD new rules to cover this. Exhibit A: post #6 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F63734?thread=109935 "...In a nutshell the advice we've been given is that campaigning should be removed... but like Lucinda in the thread above, I can't find anything in the House Rules or BBC Terms that specifically bans it. We're heading home right now (it's the end of play in London), but tomorrow we'll try to clear this up, either by adding something specific to the House Rules, or by reversing any wrong decisions. ..." I'm glad that new rules were not added in the case mentioned above. I'm sad that they obviously will be added whenever necessary to pacify the gut-reactions of BBC legal.

My understanding is that the Terms are the legalese, while the house rules and moderation guidelines and the entry on intellectual property and so forth are the English version for non-lawyers and normal people... Incidentally, there's nothing in the rules which stops them removing whatever they like - which is fair enough - otherwise they'd risk being sued for breach of contract everytime they removed something.

It is interesting that all our contributions to h2g2 fall under the privacy policy, though. One presumes that this means if I leave h2g2 then I can demand that h2g2 remove all posts and entries which contain any personal information about me, which would be HARD. That looks like good blackmail material to me... *rubs hands in an evil overlord type manner*

> "removing whatever they like"

better would be "failing whatever they like" or "censoring whatever they like". Bleh.

I'll take "censoring whatever they like."

The catch is that no one would use a website to post stuff if they thought the host censored things on a whim. Hopefully after reading the House Rules, we get some idea about what things are safe to write. I don't think they're censoring things on a whim right now, and I think I have a pretty good idea what my limits are here. But every now and then, the lawyers pop up and seem able to make the House Rules quiver just by giving them a withering glance. (Like flowers wilting when looks at them?) I'm still not sure whether BBC can see any difference between a boycott and a "campaign" of harassment. It shakes up my whole understanding of the House Rules.

(Adding insult to injury, the m2m2 blacklist page shows a message that it was deleted by author. I asked Tony to see if this was true, haven't heard from him yet. And I know the Zaphodista Propaganda page by Almighty Rob still falsely says, "This Guide Entry was deleted by the author.")

"My understanding is that the Terms are the legalese, while the house rules and moderation guidelines and the entry on intellectual property and so forth are the English version for non-lawyers and normal people..."

I disagree. The House Rules look like sort of distillation of the legalese into plain English, but in fact they point to and rely on the Terms, with no less than four hyperlinks to the same [url removed by moderator]

"If you fail to abide by these House Rules and/or the Terms and Conditions, you will be formally warned by email."

That makes the Terms an integral part of the House Rules. You could read all the House Rules and still commit transgressions against the Terms. Plus, in case the four links down the side of the page aren't enough, the last line of the House Rules says, "Don't forget to read the Terms and Conditions." (with another link inside that sentence.)

Understanding the House Rules does not absolve you of needing to understand the Terms. Therefore the murkiest, most alien-sounding parts of the Terms still have to be followed and presumably understood by non-lawyers and normal humans.

The House Rules really cover a suite of 5 pages to explain all of it.
+ House Rules page (which contains links to all below)
+ Terms and Conditions
+ General Election Guidelines
+ h2g2 and Int Prop law
and maybe also Moderation on h2g2.

"One presumes that this means..."

But you know what they say about PRESUMING, don't you????! When you presume, it makes a PRES out of U and ME!

Three points:

* When you register, you agree to abide by the Terms and Conditions, *and* the House Rules. They sit together to define what we both agree to when you join h2g2. Originally the House Rules were effectively a friendly explanation of the Terms, but that's not the case now (eg the URL policy is in the House Rules but not the Terms).

* Re the m2m2 thing, we're still waiting for Smiley Ben to rewrite the homophobe blacklist page (which could be achieved by simply removing a couple of sentences from the original piece). We have offered to moderate it ourselves, thus preventing any further moderation issues. Unfortunately he hasn't reactivated it, which is a shame - but it's up to him, of course. It's nothing to do with us, I'm afraid, so if insult is being added to injury, ask him to re-write it - after all, he fully agrees that the original version was potentially defamatory.

* The previous version of the moderation tools removed entries by deleting them, rather than just hiding them. Therefore some entries which have failed moderation in the past may show the wrong message. This has now been changed, so it won't happen in the future, and I've fixed Almighty Rob's entry to reflect reality.

Righty ho, the lawyers have come back with a response for you, Lucinda. It makes perfect sense to me - let me know if it's the same for you.

"The BBC requires that any work submitted to h2g2 is 'original' under the terms of the Copyright Act, which essentially means that the way your ideas are expressed in writing must be original, and must not be copied from another work. You can create an 'original' work even if you incorporate parts from other works into your own, provided that the use of other works complies with the provisions of the Copyright Act, which allow, for example, for fair dealing/use, and use of non-substantial parts of another work. (See the Intellectual Property page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/Writing-Copyright for further information about this.)

"By warranting that your work is 'original', you are essentially warranting that you have used sufficient original thought or skill in expressing ideas in your work, and that you have not copied another work or parts of another work. You are still able to warrant that your work is 'original' if it contains extracts, ideas or parts of another work provided that you have not breached another author's copyright in doing so. If you are in doubt as to whether you have the right to use a certain part of someone else's work, you should either seek advice or simply not use it.

"Under the Copyright Act, you are only able to waive moral rights over a work you have created. So, if you have legitimately incorporated a part of another person's work in your own (e.g. a non-substantial part, or a quote for the purposes of criticism), then while you can't waive moral rights in that other person's work, you can waive your moral rights in your work as a whole."

Does that answer your questions? Hope so... and BTW, our lawyers are actually rather nice people, just so you know.

Right, I think I get it, though I had to read it through a couple of times...

So, if I want to include something that's public domain in h2g2, I've got to add something to it {GuideML markup, for example?} so that it's original. I suppose this is so that the BBC can claim a copyright over it - reasonable enough. Presumably this means someone should yikes the Principia entry for being unoriginal? (http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A536988)

Oh, and the missing Q2, to try and salvage my counting ability... this "control who owns the right" thingamajig... under what circumstances would the BBC transfer copyright over my material to someone else?

{nice lawyers? I thought there was some sort of professional rule against that? }

You're probably right about the Principia, but personally I wouldn't get into a tiz about it. Up to you, though - technically you're right, but it's not exactly life threatening.

Question 2: Not exactly sure which bit you're referring to in the terms; there's nothing in them about 'control who owns the right' - can you clarify?

No worries about the Principia - was just checking if I'd got things straight... though I didn't realise that whether things are life threatening was something you took into account - I guess all those external URLs must be secretly deadly weapons...

Q2: I'm referring to the "moral right" to "control who owns the work" that you mentioned back somewhat in this thread.

It seems very odd that I get less control over an h2g2 entry I write than someone who I've briefly quoted in it, I have to say. However, if that's what has to happen... *shrug*

Still not sure what you're asking. When you waive your moral rights, you waive (among others) your right to control who owns the work. If you're talking about other people's quotes in your work, you never own that right to give us anyway... but it doesn't matter, because we are talking about the rights to the entire work, which *is* original, not the right to individual bits.

So what? So it means we can't take a piece of yours that quotes someone, remove everything except the quote, and then claim we have all the moral rights to that quote. We don't, but that's not your problem, it's ours.

If this isn't the question you mean, then it might be worth actually writing the question down in full. I can't read between the lines because I'm too busy.

Sorry - I'm being unclear, clearly... let me try one more time...

When we contribute stuff to h2g2, we waive our moral rights to that contribution. One of those moral rights is the right to control who owns our contribution. This means that if h2g2 were to transfer ownership of our contribution to someone else, then they are free to do so, and individual researchers cannot veto that transfer.

The question is: under what circumstances would h2g2 transfer ownership of our contribution to someone else? In other words, how will our waiving of this particular moral right make a difference? Or, put another way, could we keep this particular right without it harming h2g2's prospects?

You waive all your moral rights when you contribute to h2g2, because that's what we need - we need to be able to say 'the author of this content has waived his or her moral rights to it'.

Why? The terms try to cover all and any eventualities that may crop up when we publish the Guide in any media. We ask that you waive all your moral rights, because trying to work out which individual rights may or may not be relevant at any time in the future is dangerous: we're trying to cover ourselves for all eventualities, and who knows whan a particular right may come into play?

Certainly, at the moment, the right you quote probably doesn't affect things, though it might... this isn't my speciality.

With which deft sidestep I declare the question answered, albeit with a non-answer.

Ok - that's fair enough - while I'd *like* to only waive those rights that actually need to be waived, it's not critical, and y'all no doubt have more important things to do...


As an aside, (no response required), another right that I'd prefer to keep is the right to choose *not* to be associated with a piece of work - I can imagine this could occur if my entry was edited or merged in a way that I found distasteful. In practice, I'd expect the Italics to happilly do that anyway, but it'd be good to keep the right to it too.

Indeed we would, and there are some honest souls who ask us to remove them from the Researcher list for some Topics because they feel their contribution is too small.

Mark, thanks again for correcting the message on Almighty Rob's hidden entry. When I said it was "adding insult to injury" for the m2m2 blacklist page, I meant the incorrect message about it being deleted by the author. It's sad enough to get censored, but worse when readers are told that the author chose to delete it.

I guess if the page was actually defamatory, then you were right to remove it. It seemed from all the discussion that the main transgression was that it was "campaigning," not so much that it was breaking other valid laws.

As discussed in the original 'The BBC hates fags' Conversations, 'campaigning' per se isn't against the rules... but when campaigns drift into inciting hatred against any third parties - whether those parties are generally perceived by right-minded people as 'bad' - then the rules probably do come into play (though each case needs to be looked at on its own merits). I discussed this at length at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F55683?thread=109968 (which was also linked to from Tony/Ben's original complaint on the Zaphodista's page). And yeah, I agree about it being annoying when the wrong message is shown. That's why we changed it! :-)

Another reason I'd ideally like to keep my moral right not to be associated with my content...

--
"ARGH! What did I just write!"
*applies head to wall repeatedly*
--

You see - I knew it might have come in handy one of these days...

What the Wall - or your Head?