In addition to Patricia's excellent argument about diplomaticy vs
bullying, I'd like to say that bad laws that are not respected are not
going to be changed.
Imagine the situation: Nice Wikimedian asks Lawmaker to change the law
to reinforce the Public Domain. CL will say "I can't be bothered,
these laws are legacy stuff and not enforced anyway, like those about
killing Scottish bowmen".
Eventually,
- the written law stays the same;
- what the laws says is barely tolerable or intolerable;
- people start uploading things in disregard of the law because what
the law says seems excessive, and because, hey, the lawmaker said it's
OK, right?
Wrong. The lawmaker said no such thing. What he said was a vague
promise designed to appease both chicken and foxes. The firmly true
part of what he says is "I can't be bothered". He wants to be
re-elected, so he needs not upset anybody (also, there are lots of
things with a better "effort/political benefit" ratio to do).
Now, enter the Evil Editor. The EE wants to make an example of a
Wikimedian in order to intimidate the rest of us, cast a bad light on
the Wikimedia projects so that the public opinion sees us as a bunch
of "pirates", and eventually reinforce his position with even more
drastic copyright laws.
What would you do in his position? Of course, you would quietly wait
until some unsuspecting Wikimedian uploads something appropriately
copyrighted and somehow controversial; when a favourable situation
arises you simultaneously launch
- a legal campaign towards the Wikimedian and possibly Wikimedia in general,
- a media campaign aimed at the public opinion ("save our starving artists!")
- a lobbying towards lawmakers and politicians.
By behaving in an overconfident manner towards local copyright laws
(i.e. anything short of "quite paranoid"), we are buying empty
promises as if they were firm, and we are handing weapons to potential
enemies waiting to ambush us. Only by putting lawmakers in front of
what they have written do we have a chance of improving things. Local
laws are a problem? Well, ignoring the problem could prove dangerous,
and will certainly never solve it.
-- Rama
On 22/08/2008, Patricia Rodrigues <snooze210904(a)yahoo.se> wrote:
Bryan, I agree with you that we are not following the
spirit of the
Definition of Freedom strictly. That is the main problem, and we keep on
introducing exceptions to the general licensing spirit for the sake of
convenience. Two wrongs does not make one right - where does it stop?
Yes, it's rather unfortunate that we have already lost one administrator
because of possible legal issues. One issue is: people working with free
software/free culture in affected countries are faced with the issue that
they are promoting something (liberation of material to the public domain or
under free licenses by those who have such material closed in cellars in
museums or available only through gatekeepers, so that it's usable by
Wikimedia Commons) that in the end is useless to promote because it's
possible to use it anyway, on a clause that is perfectly fine in the US but
absolutely not in those countries. So instead of smoothly and diplomatically
convincing such institutions, we're bullying them into it. A bad strategy,
and bad publicity for Wikimedia, imho.
The other issue is: what to do if you are an admin from one of the affected
countries and receive a request from the authorities in that country to take
down some PD-Art media from the site (copyrighted in that country)? Do you
refuse your local authorities saying "it's in a server in the US, ha-ha",
risking whichever consequences, or do you violate Commons "policy" so you
won't disobey local authorities, and delete the media?... Is it possible to
be an admin in such conditions?
It's very nice to talk about lobbying for Free Culture and having some
courage against such unfair and ridiculous legislations when you're sitting
comfortably on US soil.
Well, there you go, more questions to be answered.
Regards,
PatrĂcia
--- On Thu, 21/8/08, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] PD-art and official "position of the
WMF"
To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>,
"Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Thursday, 21 August, 2008, 9:18 PM
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.
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)
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