Talk:Jennifer L. Lawless

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[Untitled][edit]

I'm confused. This is a bio of a professor that she wrote herself and gave to me and to any other places/organizations/websites that request her bio. I did my best to rewrite it in way that conformed to Wiki standards and did not violate copyright. However, it is a person's bio and therefor is going to basically say the same thing no matter where it's published. How can this be resolved?

I believe that as I was directly given this bio from the person it is about (as was every other site that references it) that this gives me permission from the author to release the text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC-BY-SA).

Am I wrong?

While facts are not copyrightable, creative elements of presentation - including both structure and language - are. While a biography is likely "going to basically say the same thing", it will not necessarily say it in the same way.

With regards to allowing you to release the text, the fact that her biography is publically distributed does not automatically give the right to others to modify and redistribute that biography. It is still her copyrighted material and she would have to explicitly release the text in order for it or a derivative work of it to be included on Wikipedia. VernoWhitney (talk) 15:48, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ok. I will begin working on a new version at the temporary page. If she were to give explicit permission to Wikipedia to use her text, how would this be done. Does the author of the copyrighted work need to directly contact Wikipedia at permissions-en (at) wikimedia (dot) org ? LucyAlice (talk) 15:53, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, if she can send an email to that address which clearly licenses it (a template is provided at WP:CONSENT to avoid ambiguity) then there will be no problems with restoring the previous text of the article. VernoWhitney (talk) 16:02, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've rewritten the original article. LucyAlice (talk) 17:27, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How long will it take for the rewrite at this temporary page to be determined acceptable or not? LucyAlice (talk) 15:31, 2 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take a look at it sometime today. VernoWhitney (talk) 15:49, 2 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]