Wily D wrote:
On 9/10/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Wily D wrote:
For the most part, there seems to be a strong
consensus that we should
steer clear of the boundries we could push fair use (or in many of our
cases, such as mine, fair dealing) to.
As an educational resource - there's probably a lot of space - I'll
warn you that I live in a foreign socialist country where we don't
believe in copyrights or suing people, so my advice may not be all
that great.
The issue is - we want to provide a free encyclopaedia for downstream
users, who may be commercial in nature. How do we be free while still
being an encyclopaedia? How do we be an encyclopaedia while still be
free? Tricky ...
WilyD
On 9/10/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I am not a US lawyer, nor is [[Pamela Jones]] of
[[Groklaw]]. But
here's some food for thought:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070907195435565
Despite my personal fondness for slash-and-burning fair abuse on en:wp
and taking away children's eyecandy, I remain a big fan of fair use,
because quotation is a necessary part of being able to talk about
something. [[Golan v. Gonzales]] (that's a red link. Could someone
please write the article?) is the US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
saying it is too.
So what's Wikipedia and Wikimedia's duty to exercise that right in the
pursuit of educational value?
- d.
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The Germans seem to have solved that question quite well. We took a page
out of their book on userboxes, maybe we should take the flipside on
nonfree content too. The way you remain free is to steer clear of
nonfree. Period, end of story, no exceptions. That's why you don't find,
for example, the nonfree nvidia driver in the Linux kernel. It could be
legally distributed that way, sure, but it's not free. Anyone who wants
it is welcome to download and install their own, but to keep the core
product (the kernel) free, it must not be distributed as part of it.
To be genuinely free, anyone should be able to take a database dump of
Wikipedia, and provided that they comply with the GFDL, put it up on a
commercial website with every last bit of data they got. Wikipedia is
currently nonfree. A lot of -parts- are free, but it only takes a bit of
pollution to make the whole nonfree.
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The Germans have done a remarkably poor job in some areas due to this.
Some of their articles, even on fairly important topics, can never
hope to be any good. We're trying to write a free encyclopaedia,
which necessarily includes it being an encyclopaedia. Fair use and
fair dealings exist for a reason - legislators recognise that we
cannot hope to write something like an encyclopaedia without these
rights. And we can't.
Right now, people can and do take dumps of Wikipedia and put it on
commercial websites with no real legal liability. The only issues are
for highly transformative uses, or for very small fractions - an
*article* with fair use images can reasonably be extracted and
mirrored, but a fair use image alone cannot be extracted and say - put
on a postcard.
So the english Wikipedia isn't a source of strictly free content. But
it is a free encyclopaedia, and we are taking strong steps to ensure
that downstream users who want to reuse content outside of an
encyclopaedia can easily identify and remove anything they can't use.
And in the end, it doesn't cost us any free content - nonfree content
is only permitted where free content could never be produced anyhow
In the end, if the community has to choose between producing strictly
free content and producing a free encyclopaedia, I'd put dollars to
dimes they'd choose the latter.
WilyD
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In a few areas, I might even choose the latter.
As to the WMF logos, trademark is a different beast then copyright.
(This is why I hate that lazy "intellectual property" term, not only
does an idea fit very poorly into the idea of property, but it
encourages the conflation of several very different laws into some
meaningless umbrella designation.) Copyright is designed to lock things
up, trademark is simply to prevent deception of consumers and unfair
degradation of the reputation of the trademark holder. If I make a crap
version of Linux, I shouldn't be able to smear Linus Torvalds or deceive
its users by distributing it as "Linux". I could still use the trademark
nominally (for example, "Based on the Linux kernel"), just like people
can say "Wikipedia" to comment on us.
This all being said, if someone ever did propose the German solution on
nonfree images, I'd have to think very carefully over whether I'd be for
or against. It would be nice to have a totally free project (and if one
can build software that way, one can build an encyclopedia that way),
but a few articles would suffer greatly. In the meantime, though, we
should quit passing ourselves off as "free" (at least the libre sense of
free), when we're not. We can certainly decide what we want the project
to be, but in the meantime we should not be dishonest about what it is,
and it is currently only gratis-free.