[WikiEN-l] Non-commercial only and By Permission Only Images to be

[Neil Harris]

Mike Finucane wrote:
> I was going to enrich Wikipedia with a whole bunch of my images, but 
> quite frankly, i dont want someone getting rich off my work.
> As such, I was intending to add creative commons no commercial use tags.
>
> Then I come across this note from you:
>
> "All images which are for non-commercial only use and by permission only
>> are not acceptable for Wikipedia and _will be deleted_.  We have
>> tolerated them for some time..."
>
>
>
> Well fear not; you wont have to tolerate any of my images.
>
> I'm going to have to re-evaluate contributing to wikipedia if its 
> based on providing source material for commercial companies.
>
> Feel free to explain WHY you have this policy; but I have to say your 
> explanation above wasnt very tactful or conducive to goodwill on my part.
>
I agree, the comment above was perhaps not as tactfully phrased as it 
could be. However, here's the reasoning behind the policy:

The goal of Wikipedia is "to create and provide a freely licensed and 
high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in his or 
her own language".

In order to achieve that goal, Wikipedia is released under the GNU Free 
Documentation License: "free" in this case, means "free as in freedom". 
Summarized, it grants the right to redistribute and use material 
licensed under it in any way whatsoever, provided that the user 
preserves those rights for any other person. This is to ensure the 
widest possible use and distribution of the encyclopedia and the 
information within it.

This necessarily includes both for-profit and nonprofit uses. However, 
it does not mean that Wikipedia is a for-profit enterprise: indeed, the 
Wikimedia Foundation which supports it is an explicitly non-profit 
organization.

One of the things that you have the freedom to do with Wikipedia is to 
distribute it at no cost. However, allowing for-profit uses can make the 
information even more widely available; for example, it encourages 
people to make derivative works that build on it, or to make and sell 
hard copies to other people. However, none of these commercial uses 
prevent people from using the information for free; indeed, because the 
GFDL requires derivative works also to be licensed under the GFDL, it 
means that Wikipedia material, so long as it remains properly licensed 
under the GFDL, cannot have its freedom stripped away, even if it is 
included in a commercial derivative product.

For example, I would be quite within my rights to make copies of the 
articles from a commercially-purchased version of Wikipedia, and to give 
them, or indeed the whole encyclopedia, away for free. Any publisher 
asserting proprietary rights over Wikipedia material would be in breach 
of the GFDL, and would no longer have the right to use the material in 
the first place.

However, for this freedom to be useful, all the material in Wikipedia 
needs to be released under the GFDL; if there are parts that have more 
restrictive licences (for example, no commercial use), a commercial 
redistributor would have to go through the entire encyclopedia checking 
the licence of every single illustration. For this reason, Wikipedia's 
copyright rules state that every piece of material in Wikipedia must 
either be licenced under the GFDL, or fall under a legitimate exemption 
under copyright law (fair use, public domain, and so on).

This is the reason why we (regretfully) cannot accept images or other 
material under noncommercial-use-only licences. I understand your desire 
not to have other people get rich off your hard work. That is your 
right, and what you do with your own copyrighted material is your own 
business.

On the other hand, have you considered getting rich off ours?

Under the terms of the GFDL, you are quite welcome to do so; indeed, 
every contributor who has licensed their copyrighted material under the 
GFDL as part of Wikipedia has explicitly consented to this. Feel free to 
publish Wikipedia content as-is, or make commercial derivative works.  
The more widely you do this, the happier we will be. I hear that running 
Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia can be quite lucrative.

The only constraints are:

* that Wikipedia's collective copyright owners (its authors) insist that 
you do so under the terms of the GFDL, a copy of which you can find 
online here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

* that you do not copy Wikipedia pages from the Wikimedia servers in 
real-time, but instead work off an offline dump of the encyclopedia (as 
the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation does not have the resources for 
performing real-time page rendering for commercial enterprises)

-- Neil