[Commons-l] [Foundation-l] PD-art and official "position of the WMF"

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 6:55 PM, Patricia Rodrigues
<snooze210904 at yahoo.se> wrote:
[...]
>
> What I hopefully can point out today is that Commons is also not complying
> to the Four Freedoms, in light of its own licensing policy, which is the
> centerpiece of the project
> (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing). We have several
> inconsistencies in our "subpolicies", but the biggest one has just been
> introduced: the modification to {{PD-Art}} that has been the topic for this
> thread. The new wording on this template reflects a position of the
> community in light of opinions/positions of WMF staff members, and goes to
> the point of considering this an official position of the WMF.
>
We have never followed the Definition of Freedom to the letter and
neither to its spirit. The Commons community has always followed their
own way interpreting freedom just like they did in the PD-art
discussion. Which ended up in a decision that will allow us to use
become a broader repository but arguably also will drift us away from
freedom in its strict sense and may have rather unfortunate
consequences for our fellow UKians and Scandinavians. I know at least
one admin who did not want to take the risk of administering a
repository that would cause him to break his country's law. In the end
this was the decision of the Commons community itself only. The
Foundation allowed the project decide for themselves which they did.

>
> I believe that if we start allowing exceptions of this kind, Commons does
> not fulfill its role as a media repository that is indeed free to reuse, and
> its existence is not making much sense. So I would like to know what is the
> future of this project, and whether it is more feasible to have local
> uploads everywhere else, tightly regulated with a legislation, whichever
> that may be, instead of a central repository of "more or less free stuff, it
> sort of depends, you know".
>
Free to reuse is rather vague. The community has always drawn the line
of freedom themselves (indeed in some cases directly violating the
Definition of Freedom and the Licensing resolution).

Bryan

(As a side note I had seen this coming. It has always been a matter of
when, not if)