W3C Policies for Contribution to W3C' wiki on Mobile Web

This document discusses copyright and liability issues surrounding the contribution to W3C's wiki on Mobile Web. The purpose of this policy is to clarify the terms for contributing to W3C's wiki on Mobile Web and secure a safe framework for contributors on the one hand and W3C on the other hand.

  1. Provisions
  2. Commentary
  3. About this Policy

1. Provisions

By requesting an account providing write access to the W3C wiki on Mobile Web, the applicant accepts that contributions will be guided by the following obligations.

1.1 Copyright allowance and license

By contributing to the W3C wiki on Mobile Web, the applicant agrees to the copyright terms defined in this section.

The applicant hereby grants to the W3C a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license under any applicant copyrights in this contribution to copy, publish, use, modify, and to distribute the contribution under the W3C Document License, as well as a right and license of the same scope to any derivative works prepared by the W3C and based on, or incorporating all or part of the contribution. The applicant further agrees that any derivative works of the contribution prepared by the W3C shall be solely owned by the W3C. For editing purposes, the applicant acknowledges that other contributors creating derivative works of the contribution act upon rights defined by this license. The applicant remains the copyright owner of the contribution.

The applicant will only upload or contribute works that she/he, or the company she/he represents, has all rights necessary to contribute to the W3C Mobile Web wiki.

W3C will retain attribution of authorship to the applicant in the logs of the wiki. Whenever modifications are made to the Materials, this fact, and the nature of the modifications, will be logged by the wiki software. Through the wiki logs, W3C will maintain a public history of contributions.

The applicant agrees that W3C will use his/her personal data for site administration and for the wiki-typical publication of information about the authors .

1.2. Abuse

W3C does not permit:

  1. The use of the wiki for advertisement and unsolicited commercial communications.
  2. Profane or vulgar language. This includes the use of language that is racist, hateful, sexual or obscene in nature.
  3. Defamation and insulting language towards natural or legal persons.
  4. Contributions that are patently off topic and constitute an abuse of the system (e.g. individual homepages without relation to the Mobile Web Initiative or W3C)
  5. The use of third party trademarks, images and other intellectual property without sufficient rights.
  6. The publication of personal data from third parties without their agreement or other sufficient rights is equally considered an abuse of the wiki.

In case of abuse W3C reserves the right to erase or block content that violates the above provisions. In case of grave or repeated abuse, W3C will suspend the account that originated the violations.

2. Commentary

The remainder of this document is informative only.

2.1 Rationale for this Policy

A wiki open to the public is vulnerable as it is a place where a whole community is publishing information out of a community process. This policy tries to protect the community-process and establish some limits to preserve the respect due to others.

The policy has two components:

2.2 Rationale for Copyright License Requirement

W3C requires that contributors license their contributions on the above terms in order to (1) allow W3C to republish information and distribute according to the W3C document license and (2) allow other contributors to make constructive modifications and other derivative works that, in turn, may be republished by W3C.

2.3. Application

This policy will be prominently linked from all over the wiki. Authors, contributors and people having an account on the wiki are able to take notice of this policy at any time from anywhere of the wiki. This is sufficient to make this policy part of the conditions for using the wiki of the Mobile Web Initiative.

About this Policy

This policy was developed by the W3C Team to govern usage and contributions to the wiki of the Mobile Web Initiative. This is the first version of the policy and might be superseded by later versions.

This policy applies to all people having an account on the wiki of the Mobile Web Initiative and making contributions to the wiki. It does not apply to contributions made before the date this policy is enacted. The policy will be enacted by an announcement to the W3C Advisory Committee and by its publication on the Wiki. Any changes to the policy will be announced on the appropriate public mailing list of the W3C group responsible for the wiki.

This version:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2006/07-incoming-wiki-copyright.html
(Announcement to the W3C Membership targeted on August 2006.)
Previous version:
N/A

Created 25 July 2006 by Rigo Wenning
last updated $id: $