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Re: [Foundation-l] Meta Ban

Klaus Graf

30 May 2007 30 May '07

6:55 p.m.

I cannot see that blocking life mirrors is allowed by the GNU FDL: "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute." Klaus Graf

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Sebastian Moleski

30 May 30 May

7:05 p.m.

On 5/30/07, Klaus Graf <klausgraf(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

...

I cannot see that blocking life mirrors is allowed by the GNU FDL: "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute."

It certainly is. Wikimedia can freely choose who it will distribute its licensed content to. Users accessing Wikimedia sites with a web browser are fine. Live mirrors leeching bandwidth are not. There is nothing that mandates Wikimedia to distribute its contents to everyone for every reason for no price. Sebastian

Anthony

7:24 p.m.

On 5/30/07, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 5/30/07, Klaus Graf <klausgraf(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

I cannot see that blocking life mirrors is allowed by the GNU FDL: "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute."

It certainly is. Wikimedia can freely choose who it will distribute its licensed content to.

Agreed. There is nothing that

...

mandates Wikimedia to distribute its contents to everyone for every reason for no price.

Michael Bimmler

7:27 p.m.

Okay...wait. It is very bad style to use another emailaddress to circumvent moderation, whatever the content of your message is. This is not acceptable. You could have submitted the message with the old account and I would have approved it, as there is nothing objectionable in it. But using another emailadress to prevent this? No way. Michael On 5/30/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:

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On 5/30/07, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 5/30/07, Klaus Graf <klausgraf(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

I cannot see that blocking life mirrors is allowed by the GNU FDL: "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute."

It certainly is. Wikimedia can freely choose who it will distribute its licensed content to.

Agreed. There is nothing that

mandates Wikimedia to distribute its contents to everyone for every reason for no price.

Well, the mission statement does say that "The Foundation will make and keep the educational content from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity." Doesn't explicitly say "everyone, for every reason", but I would think that's the spirit of the statement. Those using excessive bandwidth or other resources obviously need to be throttled, of course. Anthony _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Robert Horning

8:10 p.m.

Sebastian Moleski wrote:

...

On 5/30/07, Klaus Graf <klausgraf(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

I cannot see that blocking life mirrors is allowed by the GNU FDL: "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute."

I think there needs to be made a point here, that the WMF certainly can control to whom and for how much they want to charge for people who want to copy content from Wikimedia servers. The GFDL explicitly permits even commercial projects and even for-profit corporations from making money off of content available under the GFDL. The difference here is that the WMF can't tell you what you can and can't do with that content after you have received that content... provided you use the content according to the terms of the GFDL. And even then the WMF has very little say in what can't be done with the content even if you breech the terms of the GFDL.... as the WMF doesn't even have a copyright on the vast majority (nearly all) of the content on Wikimedia projects. They couldn't even be a party in enforcing the GFDL for 99.9999% of the content. This is one area where the WMF is not as quite of a strong ground as the Free Software Foundation, as the FSF *does* own copyright on all of the "official" GNU software. So it can enforce the GPL for software it has a copyright to. In regards to "live" mirrors that are constantly sucking bandwidth off of the Wikimedia server farm, I would have to agree that this is a major problem and something that should be dealt with, both on a legal front as well as through technical means. I would be curious about some comparisons of the bandwidth need of a *very* active Wikimedia user/administrator who is on-line nearly 24/7 vs. one of these mirror sites. I think it would be easy for an active editor/user to suck at least 1 GB of data/day, but it would be along this order of magnitude of bandwidth. It would be an interesting test to see how much it would actually come out to in practice. Robert Horning

Todd Allen

11:13 p.m.

Robert Horning wrote:

...

Sebastian Moleski wrote:

On 5/30/07, Klaus Graf <klausgraf(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

I cannot see that blocking life mirrors is allowed by the GNU FDL: "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute."

But even so, the Foundation has every right to say "It is totally acceptable for a very active administrator (or even a very voracious reader) to use 1 GB a day if they want to, but it is not acceptable for a live mirror to do so." Legitimate (even if heavy) users of a site are one thing, bandwidth leeches are quite another.

Robert Horning

31 May 31 May

12:23 a.m.

Todd Allen wrote:

...

Robert Horning wrote:

In regards to "live" mirrors that are constantly sucking bandwidth off of the Wikimedia server farm, I would have to agree that this is a major problem and something that should be dealt with, both on a legal front as well as through technical means. I would be curious about some comparisons of the bandwidth need of a *very* active Wikimedia user/administrator who is on-line nearly 24/7 vs. one of these mirror sites. I think it would be easy for an active editor/user to suck at least 1 GB of data/day, but it would be along this order of magnitude of bandwidth. It would be an interesting test to see how much it would actually come out to in practice. Robert Horning

I guess in part here I'm trying to propose a technical solution of sorts. Perhaps bandwidth for a particular IP address could be throttled in some way that would allow a very heavy but legitimate user to access the 50-100 pages or so a day that they actually read in some depth (just to give a figure), but not allow a mirror to suck up every change unless they have made some sort of financial arrangement with the WMF to pay for this extra bandwidth. The WMF will certainly not "make a profit" doing this, and even if it became a problem with the IRS, solutions could still be found to help get these mirrors to pay for the resources they are taking up. The trick is that some of these mirrors can and do use some very sneaky methods to keep their sites up to date with current data. While you can cull out some of these sites and segregating them from ordinary users, this is a technical arms race to see who can block the live mirrors and those sites with hackers that can "fake" the ability to send requests that look like ordinary user requests to keep the pages up to date. That I can come up with an algorithm right now to seem like random user pages is enough to make me think this could get to the point that would make it nearly impossible to detect, except for seeing the pages on the mirror show up with very recent changes. Most mirrors aren't that cleaver, so this may not apply in practice.

Slowking Man

30 May 30 May

7:31 p.m.

On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 20:55 +0200, Klaus Graf wrote:

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To dispel this misconception again: the GFDL does not require that recipients redistribute copies of the work to anyone who asks, only that any copies which are distributed are not encumbered by DRM. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Overly_broad_DR…. Additionally, the only restriction placed on the method of redistribution is that the work be provided in a non-proprietary format; it certainly doesn't require that the Foundation allow anyone to use its bandwidth without permission. -- Slowking Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Slowking_Man)

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participants (7)

Anthony
Klaus Graf
Michael Bimmler
Robert Horning
Sebastian Moleski
Slowking Man
Todd Allen