[WikiEN-l] Non-Commercial Usage

[Andrew Gray]

On 28/11/05, Mike Finucane <mike_finucane at yahoo.com> wrote:

> (6) "And our commercial mirrors bring in new business, make donations
> and have helped pay wages for Wikipedia employees."
> "put on DVD, and sold for  ten euros(?). A large swathe of this went
> back to the Foundation"
>
> I have no objection to any use of the images, for non-profit use.  That
> is, if Wikipedia makes money from selling disks to people, I'm fine by
> that, provided that the money is used to fund wikipedia.

CC-by-nc-2.5 contains this, which I believe is the core of nc:

"You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3
above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward
commercial advantage or private monetary compensation."

This is... wow. Vague, to say the best. It's very unclear what this
means in terms of distribution. I can make a very good case that the
Wikimedia Foundation distributing ten-dollar DVDs as a fundraiser is
doing it "directed toward commercial advantage". Used by a non-profit
organisation, certainly, but commercial activity does not only mean
things where someone makes a profit. There's even situations where
giving it away gratis would count as intended for commercial advantage
- "free copies" in a newspaper promotion, say.

>  I *do* have a
> problem if someone -say a newspaper - lifts one of my images from
> Wikipedia, and uses it instead of paying for their own photography, and
> makes a profit therefrom.  Now I'm not the legal expert here that most
> are, and I suppose "non-profit" use may not cover the generation of
> money by non-profit organizations.

Bingo.

> In which case, I dare say, the same people could find a way to write
> this and include it in the Wiki License.

Mmmuh. What if a local chapter of the Foundation is, for local legal
reasons, constituted as a for-profit corporation and not a charity?
They may wish to do exactly the same as Wikimedia Germany did - make
money by selling copies, plough it back in - but because of legal
hairsplitting over "nonprofit" wouldn't be able to. (I mean, do any of
us have any idea what Ugandan charity law might be? Is there even
Ugandan charity law?)

> I would encourage people to consider other possibilities, other than
> engaging in or with the for-profiteers.  One suggestion would be to
> sell and widely distribute DVDs, by some of the wikipedia wage-earners,
> all profits going back to pay for the system.  Make it $20 for all I
> care.  I dont even mind policies whereby other non-profits can use the
> free material.

Sure. But to make profits to plough back in, we have to... make
profits. Okay, suppose you write a release such that Wikimedia gets
the right to do this.

Then Wikimedia collapses in a flaming internal dispute next month -
it's not impossible, and it's a problem which is actively forseen at
the moment. The project is basically, as I understand it, trying to
futureproof against this...

What would happen under the current situation is that there would be a
hiatus, and the project would restart once hosting was found, under a
new name, and another non-profit would spring up... but one which is
legally nothing to do with the previous one, just using the same
content. How do all our license waivers, or used-on-X-with-permission
images, help then?

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk