Tatoeba
The terms "owner" and "belongs to" can lead to legal misinterpretation
Context
From a discussion we had regarding copyright laws, one conclusion was that the terms "owner" and "belongs to" can mislead people to think that the sentence owner has legal rights over a sentence.
Related Wall thread: https://tatoeba.org/en/wall/show_message/37243#message_37243
The term "owner" was introduced by myself back in 2009, and I chose it because I really had no better idea.
Suggestions
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We could change the wording. Some ideas are:
- "maintainer" / "maintained by XXX"
- "custodian" / "in custody of XXX" (?)
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We could add an explanation somewhere (not sure where) about what exactly is a sentence owner/maintainer/custodian.
Does the user give up copyright over a sentence to Tatoeba, or do they license Tatoeba to redistribute it under the name Tatoeba with CC-BY license?
Should the variables be renamed? I wouldn't think so, but it might help with readability later.
Users do not typically assign the copyright for their contributions to Tatoeba, but only license it instead as described in the terms of use.
"maintainer" / "maintained by XXX"
We already use "maintainer" in "corpus maintainer", I think that could easily create confusion.
"custodian" / "in custody of XXX" (?)
"custodian" why not, but the passive form "in/under custody of" sounds a bit cumbersome.
I’d like to suggest: keeper. It’s vague enough to be easily translated in whatever is easy to use and legally safe in other languages, and it’s easy to use in passive form "kept by".
