Today, The Grandma and her friends Claire Fontaine, JordiSantanyí, Josep deCa'thLon, Rennette Watson, Tina Picotes & Tonyi Tamaki want to congratulate Wikipedia for its 20th anniversary.
Wikipedia is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopaedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer editors, and it is the first source of this blog, a blog created as a tool to help TheGrandma with her classes.
Congratulations to all people who participate in this wonderful project and long live for Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopaediacreated and maintained by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.
It is one of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa, as of January 2021 and The Economist newspaper placed it as the 13th-most-visited place on the web. Featuring no advertisements, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation,an American non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
Sanger coined its name as a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopaedia. It was initially an English-language encyclopaedia, but versions in other languages were quickly developed. With 6.2 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 300 Wikipedia encyclopaedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 55 million articles, attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors per month.
Wikipedia has been criticized for its uneven accuracy and for exhibiting systemic bias, including gender bias, with the majority of editors being male. Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics.
In 2006, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopaedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales. The project's reputation improved further in the 2010s as it increased efforts to improve its quality and reliability, based on its unique structure, curation and absence of commercial bias.
In 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles.
Other collaborative online encyclopaedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were as successful.
Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopaedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.
Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopaedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.
On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a feeder project for Nupedia.
The domains wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001, and January 13, 2001, respectively, and Wikipedia was launched onJanuary 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.
Wikipedia's policy of neutral point-of-view was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia. Originally, Bomis intended to make Wikipedia a business for profit.
There are currently 317 language editions of Wikipedia, also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias. As of January 2021, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, Swedish, German, French, and Dutch Wikipedias.
In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Russian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Waray, Vietnamese, Japanese, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Arabic, Ukrainian and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Catalan, Serbian, Indonesian, Norwegian Bokmål, Korean and Finnish), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000.
Today, The Grandma is creating new material for her courses. She has wanted to have more information about Copyright Laws and Lawsof Author because they are changing constantly and it is very important to respect the authors of works before including them in your own manuals.
The Grandma loves sharing information without any kind of legal restriction. She thinks that Internet must be a free place to share knowledge and information and it will not be the best place if its users start to forbid the access to information or if Internet becomes a place to do business losing the original idea of sharing information waiting for nothing in return.
This free concept of Internet is the best reason because of The Grandma uses Wikipedia to refill her posts. Wikipedia is a free space, a great web created with the effort of thousands of people in different languages with posts that have a great reputation in a high percentage.
The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War.
The stated object of the act was the encouragement of learning, and it achieved this by securing authors the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending the copies of their maps, charts, and books for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
The 1710 British Statute of Anne did not apply to the American colonies. The colonies' economy was largely agrarian, hence copyright law was not a priority, resulting in only three private copyright acts being passed in America prior to 1783. Two of the acts were limited to seven years, the other was limited to a term of five years.
In 1783 a committee of the Continental Congress concluded that nothing is more properly a man's own an the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tends to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries.
But under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress had no authority to issue copyright; instead it passed a resolution encouraging the States to secure
to the authors or publishers of any new book not hitherto printed...
the copy right of such books for a certain time not less than fourteen
years from the first publication; and to secure to the said authors, if
they shall survive the term first mentioned,... the copy right of such
books for another term of time no less than fourteen years.
Copyright Act of 1790, Section 1
Three states had already enacted copyright statutes in 1783 prior to the ContinentalCongress resolution, and in the subsequent three years all of the remaining states except Delaware passed a copyright statute. Seven of the States followed the Statute of Anne and the Continental Congress' resolution by providing two fourteen-year terms. The five remaining States granted copyright for single terms of fourteen, twenty and twenty-one years, with no right of renewal.
At the Constitutional Convention 1787 both James Madison of Virginia and Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina submitted proposals that would allow Congress the power to grant copyright for a limited time. These proposals are the origin of the CopyrightClause in the United States Constitution, which allows the granting of copyright and patents for a limited time to serve a utilitarian function, namely to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
During the first session of the 1st United States Congress in 1789, the House of Representative considered enacting a copyright law. The historian Davit Ramsay petitioned congress seeking to restrict the publication of his History of the American Revolution on April 15.
Congressmen
Thomas Tudor Tucker, Alexander White, and Benjamin Huntington examined
his claims and a copyright committee consisting of Huntington, Lambert
Cadwalader, and Benjamin Contee began drafting the legislation on April
20. Jedidiah Morse, Nicholas Pike, and Hannah Adams each also petitioned
Congress with their interests in restricting the printing of texts.
Their bill moved to the Committee of the Whole House in June, but the matter was postponed in anticipation of the first recess, to be taken up again when the House reconvened.
Both houses of Congress pursued a copyright law more pointedly during 1790's second session. They responded to President George Washington's 1790 State of the Union Address, in which he urged Congress to pass legislation designed for the promotion of Science and Literature so as to better educate the public. This led to the Patent Act of 1790 and, shortly thereafter, the Copyright Act of 1790.
The scope of what works would be covered by the law's exclusivity was contended in the House. When he reintroduced the matter, Aedanus Burke wanted to establish a first law about copyright regarding literary property, but Alexander White called for the expansion of copyright beyond writings on the behalf of Jedidiah Morse, who wrote to Congress in fear that unauthorized copying of his American Geography would hurt his business.
The need to re-raise the copyright
issue, among other items left unresolved at the end of the first
session, required the House to clarify some order of business problems
over whether or not they could reopen unfinished business from a
previous session. That settled, the House established a drafting
committee for the law on February 1, chaired by Abraham Baldwin.
Eventually, the House passed a copyright bill and passed it to the Senate.
The Senate also deliberated on Copyright
after the President's speech. On May 14, the Senate passed an amended
version of the bill sent to them by the House. The House accepted their
amendment on May 18 and the bill passed to the President.
George Washington
The bill was signed into law on May 31, 1790 by George Washington and published in its entirety throughout the country shortly after.
The Act granted copyright for a term of fourteen years from the time of recording the title thereof, with a right of renewal for another fourteen years if the author survived to the end of the first term. It restricted books, maps, and charts. Although musical composition were not mentioned in the text of the act, and would not be expressly covered by copyright until the Copyright Act of 1831, they were routinely registered under the 1790 Act as books. The Act also did not mention paintings or drawings, which were not covered until the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1870.
The Act was copied almost verbatim from the 1709 British Statute of Anne. The first sentences of the two laws are almost identical. Both require registration in order for a work to receive copyright protection; similarly, both require that copies of the work be deposited in officially designated repositories such as the Library of Congress in the United States, and the Oxford and Cambridge universities in the United Kingdom.
The Statute of Anne and the Copyright Act of 1790 both provided for an initial term of 14 years, renewable once by living authors for an additional 14 years, for works not yet published.
The Statute of Anne differed from the 1790 Act,
however, in providing a 21-year term of restriction, with no option for
renewal, for works already published at the time the law went into
effect (1710). The 1790 Act only offered a 14-year term for previously published works.
The Copyright Act of 1790 applied exclusively to citizens of the United States. Non-citizens and material printed outside the United States could not be granted any copyright protection until the International Copyright Act of 1891. Consequently, Charles Dickens sometimes complained about cheap American knockoffs of his work for which he received no royalty.
At the time, works only received protection under federal statutory copyright if the statutory formalities, such as a proper copyright notice, were satisfied. If this was not the case, the work immediately entered into the public domain. In 1834 the Supreme Court ruled in Wheaton v. Peters, a case similar to the British Donaldson v Beckett of 1774, that although the author of an unpublished work had a common law right to control the first publication of that work, the author did not have a common law right to control reproduction following the first publication of the work.
The Act was first amended on April 29, 1802, extending copyright restriction to etchings and, for the first time, requiring notice of copyright registration on copies of the works. The Act did not specify a consequence of failing to include that notice; however, the federal case Ewer v. Coxe established that the failure to include notice invalidated a copyright.
The Act was also amended on February 15, 1819 to expand the jurisdiction of circuit courts, analogous to today's district courts, to allow them to hear cases on patents and copyrights.
