User talk:Hapa

Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or contact me personally.

And I do mean welcome to Wikibooks. Really.

I would like to point out that adding content to Wikimedia projects that has been licensed under the CC-by-SA-NC license is a violation of the terms of the Gnu Free Document License, as the GFDL does permit some limited forms of commercial activity. I am supportive of people that use the non-commercial use only license for their works, and I appreciate the viewpoint they are trying to make. It just doesn't blend together with content that does permit commercial use so there is a conflict of the copyright licenses and makes it illegal to copy that sort of content to this project. To be honest, I don't know what sort of commercial activity might be used with the Rip a karaoke cd Wikibook, but I'm just pointing out that it is generally permitted with Wikibooks content.

This license (the GFDL) has been used since the inception of Wikibooks, and a major discussion about this has been done by many other people who do a better job of explaining the issue than myself. To change the license would mean to completely kill this project and restart totally from scratch, losing out on all of the content that has been added here for the past three years.

I hope that you understand this issue, and are willing to work with us on this point.

I'd also like to point out that we strongly discourage endorsing specific commercial businesses here. This isn't an official rule, so you can argue your point and remove the npov tag if you want to in this regard. There are some Wikibooks that are specifically about a particular commercial product, so obviously there is some leeway about that anyway. The point here is that endorsing a product like "If you don't already have one, buy a Plextor CD-RW. Many CDRWs will not read or write a CD+G properly, all Plextor drives do" is a specific point of view. There are many manufacturing companies who make blank CD-Rs, some better than others, but you should try to qualify why you think that Plextor CDs are superior, such as "the New York Times has reviewed different CD-ROM media and found that Plextor CDs are superior than other brands."

We are also in the middle of trying to come up with a general policy about encouraging illegal activity. Ripping a CD is a marginal activity at best. Yes, I do know the legal reasons for copying tracks for personal use, but I'm mainly here to let you know that it is skating on thin ice here. I think the DRM restrictions that keep you from doing this sort of activty with music or audio recordings is absolutely stupid, and even worse if you were the original author/creator/songwriter of the content on that CD. Still, this is a point of view that needs to be tempered.

All of this discussion is to help you to improve the content you have written, not to discourage you from participating on Wikibooks. I hope that you continue to get involved here, and I would like to see more contributions from you in the future. Please read some of the links listed above before you get too far into adding large amounts of content here, but we really do want to have more people come here and help us to write the various texts we call Wikibooks. --Rob Horning 16:31, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the in depth review and for bringing things to my attention. I will make further comments about the tutorial on Talk:Rip_a_karaoke_cd where it seems it would be most appropriate.--Hapa 20:16, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

VfD for CD Ripping book
I was hoping it wouldn't get to this, but somebody else has nominated your book for deletion on the Votes for deletion page. I guess it is partially my fault because I raised a stink over this in some very public forums and unfortunately used your book as an example of one that should be used for review under some "no illegal activity" policy. My point in those discussions was that deleting books on the basis that it covered illegal activity was a very subjective process, and that it put a huge burden on people like myself, as well as opened up a huge area for abuse by individuals who delete content at the drop of a hat.

Please know that 1) I am not the only user or even admin on Wikibooks and 2) This is not an attack against you personally.

Don't take this personally, and I really would like to see you remain on Wikibooks and help us out. Try to defend what you've written if you can, and explain legal uses for the information as well. I'll do what I can, but this seems to me to be a losing fight. --Rob Horning 15:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
 * 'Tis no big deal - Maybe it's not an appropriate article for Wikibooks, I'll come up with something more appropriate in the near future, at the very minimum it survives at OpenTutorial:Rip_a_karaoke_cd, meanwhile I'll keep trolling wikibooks for stuff to fix. I'm learning a great deal by participating here and having a good time also.--Hapa 21:33, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Windows screenshots
You cannot mark any of screenshots of Microsoft programs as own work. They are protected by law and therefore fair use. --Derbeth talk 21:36, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the clarification and I will remedy the issue ASAP