BTW, I could not print the whole page properly with Firefox 90.0.2! Someone told that it had some interesting HTML tags .... No problem printing it using Edge. _________________ Router: Asus RT-N18U (rev. A1)
Drink, Blink, Stretch! Live long and prosper! May the Force and farces be with you!
I read though much of that article. For starters it's cobbled together from a lot of source material under Fair Use, the author isn't using original content. He CANNOT give us permission for using much of what's in there because he doesn't own most of the content. The main contribution he has made was gathering a lot of bits and pieces together into one article. That aggregation has value and is recognized as original material by copyright law. BUT THE INFORMATION IN THE ARTICLE IS NOT OWNED BY THE AUTHOR so he cannot give a blanket permission to us to use it.
We could ask his permission to include the article in it's entirety. But we may need to go back and get permission from the original authors for every original item that he lifted from elsewhere.
The author is also WELL AWARE of this problem. For example here's one item in the article:
"To the right is an unusual example of actual measured PHY speeds in real life between a router and a laptop computer. Notice that the laptop might report a 'good' 270 Mbps for the Link Speed (out of max possible of 300 Mbps), but that downloads from the Internet will only use a PHY speed of 216 Mbps! Admittedly, this example is unusual, as most often the (higher powered) router can transmit at a faster PHY to the PC than the PC can transmit to the router."
The article author has taken someone else's post, probably in a forum somewhere, and scrubbed all identifying information from it so that he can include it as "an example" essentially hearsay, unsupported evidence. We don't know and there's no way to check if the original work done actually measured 270 and 216. For that example it's not critical because he's trying to explain that wifi connections are not symmetrical (which is "proven" elsewhere) but it was done to strip copyright protections from the original work.
The ONLY permission he can give is how he structured the information into one giant article. And our Wiki system isn't designed for this and in any case what he did has a couple of major issues and we wouldn't want to just lift it as is - unless we wanted to use it as a "wifi course"
Basically he's trying to put together essentially an online course on "what is wifi" If someone really wants to learn the ins and outs of it, reading his article a bit at a time for a week would be a great way to do it. Of course, you would then forget most of the details a month later but you would be able to refer back to the article for them.
However because of what he's trying to do there's a giant amount of repetition in the article. That's exactly what you need in an educational course - humans won't retain something until they have heard or read it at least 6 times - but it makes this article very difficult to fold into the wiki system.
ALSO, keep in mind that public specifications and standards and facts ARE NOT copyrightable per copyright law. For example take the statement from the article:
"For example, the Motorola E5 Play (very low end) smartphone does NOT support 802.11ac, but does support dual-band 802.11n, so it connects to the 5 GHz band, but only using 20/40 MHz channels (in 1×1 mode), not the 80 MHz channels of 802.11ac, and not using 256-QAM."
That is not copyrightable because it is a simple statement of the phone's specifications. IT IS A FACT and facts cannot be copyrighted. I cannot copyright E=mc2 for example, neither could Einstein.
In summary, a link to this article in a short paragraph explaining that it's an in-depth delve into wifi IS the correct way to handle it. And especially it should be required reading for anyone wanting to plunk down $300 for a brand new router in hopes they will get "better wifi" I would LOVE to plaster Appendix O throughout the DD-wrt wifi wiki! From that:
"Add wired Ethernet everywhere you can in a new home, like to AP locations and all streaming device locations, etc.
But isn't the future all wireless? If so, then so is slow Wi-Fi and packet loss! Yes, wireless continues to improve, but the simple fact is that wireless can't come close to the incredible speed and reliability of wired connections."
I would CORRECT this to remove "in a new home" however!
Now, it's true that URLs come and go - but, the takeaway here is that if someone wanted to spend a lot of time with this article rewriting bits and pieces of it and folding them into the wiki - they would NOT need permission from the article author since they can go back to the same sources he used and get that permission from them - and a LOT of what's in the article is specifications and doesn't need permission to use anyway.
Joined: 26 Mar 2013 Posts: 1857 Location: Hung Hom, Hong Kong
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 13:26 Post subject:
tedm wrote:
I read though much of that article. For starters it's cobbled together from a lot of source material under Fair Use, the author isn't using original content. He CANNOT give us permission for using much of what's in there because he doesn't own most of the content. The main contribution he has made was gathering a lot of bits and pieces together into one article. That aggregation has value and is recognized as original material by copyright law. BUT THE INFORMATION IN THE ARTICLE IS NOT OWNED BY THE AUTHOR so he cannot give a blanket permission to us to use it
.....
Now, it's true that URLs come and go - but, the takeaway here is that if someone wanted to spend a lot of time with this article rewriting bits and pieces of it and folding them into the wiki - they would NOT need permission from the article author since they can go back to the same sources he used and get that permission from them - and a LOT of what's in the article is specifications and doesn't need permission to use anyway.
PS I'm NOT volunteering to do this
Make a reference then... think about durability later.
Appendix O... um... I don't have a big house. That part is like talking about company network cabling.
I think the article has too much information, notably about the bands. But it's hard work!!!
_________________ Router: Asus RT-N18U (rev. A1)
Drink, Blink, Stretch! Live long and prosper! May the Force and farces be with you!
