On 02/04/2008, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 01/04/2008, Peter Ansell
<ansell.peter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 02/04/2008, Matthew Brown
<morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Ian Woollard
<ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've put in keep opinions for all the ones listed there.
What this is is a recurrence of an issue that comes around every so
often; whether non-copyright restrictions are important as regards
freedom for images. The NASA case (and other US government insignia)
can be regarded as a special case of trademark protection in most
ways. Wikipedia's track record is that the depiction of trademarked
items does not render an image unfree for our purposes, and this
should follow the same logic.
I had a screenshot of wikipedia I made and uploaded for debugging
purposes deleted as unfree...
Which it is. Screenshots of wikipedia pages are a complete copyright
mess. Unfree bits GPL bits GFDL bits CC bits.
Makes you wonder how a GPL programme with GFDL encyclopaedia data and
possibly CC images which all in themselves are free, got to be so
messed up despite its progress so far. Maybe the whole free culture
thing is really a joke as the people who declare it don't have the
monetary resources to enforce it or even decide themselves what status
compilations are.
Not to mention that like a few others, I allow all of my contributions
to be CC BY-SA/GFDL dual liccensed :)... I do like the trend on the
non-Wikimedia parts of the web to make all free culture items CC based
though. Gets away from the horrid complexities of the GFDL programme
documentation focused license so at least you have a hope of clearly
making up your own mind that your data can easily be entrenched in
someone elses site. Did wikipedia really think GFDL was going to
spread through the web given its complexity?
Seems
reasonable to me. Maybe I should have anonymised Wikipedia by
blocking out the copyright part of the interface and declared the rest
as PD/GPL. The generic visual representation of a user interface
produced entirely by GPL software should not be under any copyright
restrictions ;-)
Well the normal GPL ones (if all else fails
http://id.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/headbg.jpg is protectable
by copyright)
The wikipedia foundation really has made sure they believe doublethink
completely without question in this respect if they make it look for
all purposes like wikipedia is free culture but then copyright the
basic aspects so you ironically can't use "it", just the data... It is
interesting that they have so many copyright elements though in a
serious sense too. Makes you wonder what exactly they fear from
copyleft and why they can put on a straight doublethink face for the
media who don't understand these nuances.
Peter