Weekly Update 12th August - CC0 Waiver Process + Save the dates: Accent Workflow

Common Voice
,
#1

Hey Common Voice Community,

For this week’s weekly update we would like to share the following opportunities and updates…

:books: CC0 Waiver Process for preexisting works

A key part of mobilising for languages on Common Voice is access to public license text. For some languages this has been a barrier, to overcome this many contributors and organisations have kindly donated text via a CC0 Waiver process with our legal team.

To support all language communities to take part in this process we will be publishing the Common Voice Contribution Agreement form for pre-existing that are not under a public license. Read more about how to use the form on the Common Voice Community Playbook.

Link shared is the draft branch of the Community Playbook, this will be available on github pages once final touches are made for V1.2

:gift: Reward and recognition

We are inviting community members to take part in co-creating a reward and recognition process for Common Voice contributors. If you would like to take part in please join the conversation on this thread.

:calendar: Save the date: Community session on Accent Workflow (UI Profile Creation)

As mentioned in a previous weekly update, we are currently experimenting with Accent Workflow Improvements. We would love for the community to take part in this and would like to invite you to a community session on the following dates.

Dates

  • Wednesday 1st September 6 pm (BST)/10 am (PT)
  • Thursday 2nd September 1 pm(BST)/8 PM (UTC+8)

Registration will be available next week.

At the session, you will have the opportunity to share your thoughts on two UI ideas we have for accent workflow on profile creation.

We will also be sharing a Typeform for people who can’t attend to share their views.

:left_speech_bubble: Help guide Mozilla’s Common Voice Work in East Africa

Common Voice Kiswahili team are conducting a Mozilla is conducting use-case research to determine how the Common Voice dataset can be used in the realms of agriculture or finance within East Africa. If you would like to take part please check out the link.

Key Dates and Reminders

If you have any questions please, feel free to ask!

All the best,

Hillary,
:sparkles:

4 Likes
Weekly Update Thread - 2021-2022
#2

Hello Hillary,
Why not use something like https://cla-assistant.io
It’s automatic, saves a lot of time and overhead.
I came across that when I contributed to the CLDR project under Unicode. Here is an example (https://cla-assistant.io/unicode-org/cldr?pullRequest=1402)

#3

Hey @heyhillary, about the CC0 Waiver Process for preexisting works…

To be clear: This ls only a waiver for use in CV. They will not be forced to make the source public domain. As it is a legal issue I have to recheck…

Is it usable now? I’m an editor of a monthly online periodical and have connections to several NGO’s. Many others can also use this waiver if above statement is correct…

Thanks…

1 Like
#4

Hey @bozden

Please note, that I can’t give legal advice.

Yeah the CC0 waiver process is live and has been used.

By signing the agreement, the work becomes CC0 in order to participate in CV , which is CC0 licensed project.

To give a case study: A digital newspaper editor wants to donate text to CV. Only the text on the website that they own copyright for is agreed to become CC0 licensed. This text is now able to donate the text to CV as CC0 is now established on the text.

I hope this helps, I’m happy to ask legal if you have a follow-up question.

1 Like
#5

Thank you, that was very clear. This process will open many opportunities… I’ll be connecting Mozilla legal anyway, being a “matchmaker” :slight_smile:…

#6

After @ftyers’s comment in Matrix, I carefully re-read the material. It seems that I totally misunderstood.

I thought that waiver was something similar to the arrangement between Wikipedia and Mozilla… Whenever the agreement refers to https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode , everything breaks.

I don’t think I can convince anyone to CC-0 their work(s) permanently and globally.

:frowning:

Süreç, doğrular, yanlışlar ve veri kümesinin iyileştirilmesi
! Destek gereken noktalar!
#7

Yeah as mentioned in the above the donated works become CC-0 therefore permenant as Francis has mentioned.

I would still encourage you to ask people they may not want to contribute everything of their works but snippets e.g blurbs.

Alterntively, there could be alterntives to donating text that reflects “real life”, for example could you host an open call for articles under cc-0 that tie to themes such as International Day for Universal Access to Information and International Mother Languges Day.

#8

This is possible, but please advise: How can we make “snippets” CC-0? Do you have a checklist explaining the process somewhere? A couple of sentences per article are already regarded as fair use but AFAIK it is not accepted.

Or, we have rather large groups of translators / programmers / electricians / enthusiasts etc in Facebook. I can convince the admins/moderators (most are friends) to open a chatroom, so that everybody writes their own sentences to be donated. How can we make this resource CC-0 wrt to Mozilla legal? Does stating that openly suffice?

The two special days you mentioned are very promising opportunities, I didn’t know them. I will miss the first one thou…

1 Like
#9

@bozden Yes, stating it openly, each of the authors will be sufficient. Also having a CC-0 chatroom is a great idea!

1 Like
#10
  1. I tried the process, it is time consuming and will create a serious bottle nick!
  2. I could be wrong, but this is not needed in the case study.
    Adding at the website’s footer the following should be enough:
    Only the text is marked with CC0 1.0

Check out the license chooser process from the official Creative Commons website
Why create a process when there is already one?

#11

Hey Daniel,

Part of the reason we created this process was for indemnity to ensure that when big pieces of text where added in, all parties (copyright owners, community members and mozilla) could had clear terms for engaging in the donation of big text under cc0.

I am currently evaluating with legal if we could do a decleration process similar to the one you mentioned but at the mean time, the current process applies only for when copyright owners wants to waiver cc0.

1 Like
#12

This action can be part of the copyleft movement but would not solve our problem where we can get smaller parts of copyrighted works…

E.g. for 1000 hours one would need 1M sentences and most of them should be from current spoken vocabulary. Only few texts from 70 years before can have these.

For this, we need large volume resources, preferably online… A single book provides about 3000 sentences on the average - from my experience… Only a small part of what would be needed… A very limiting factor for languages spoken by fewer people.

In addition, the single speaker - single sentence methodology is already trimming the datasets a lot.

#13

A follow-up question, probably for Mozilla Legal department…

  1. Suppose we have an online resource (newspaper, magazine, blog etc)
  2. They cannot mark the whole newspaper/magazine CC-0
  3. We extract suitable sentences (automatic validation for 1-14 words etc. + human intervention) from their database and randomize them. If you read it, it will be nonsense.
  4. They publish these sentences in a new online post on the same domain accessible on the Internet and put “These sentences are Public Domain/CC-0” wording.

Now, can these be used for our purposes - legally?

#14

in theory, no.

wikipedia is a special case with legal agreement, that model cannot apply to other copyrighted resources.

#15

Now, can these be used for our purposes - legally?

Yes, of course!

1 Like
#16

Oh, I did not aware the “They” here stand for the author of the contents. In that case, yes, the author always have the right to relicense particular parts of their work as CC0, so we can indeed use them after they publish them to the public domain.

2 Likes
#17

Hi @heyhillary, what do you think?

#18

Will need to ask legal for this one

1 Like