On 2/28/14, 1:43 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 28 February 2014 08:27, Delirium
<delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
But the other Wikimedia projects are *also*
supposed to share that goal: of
producing a Free-as-in-freedom encyclopedia whose contents can be safely
reused and adapted by a wide range of other people and organizations, who
should be able to assume that it is legal to do so without exhaustive
case-by-case investigation. The movement's main job is not merely hosting
the websites *.wikipedia.org, putting up whatever we find useful to put up,
and taking down things when we get complaints or lawsuits.
You're justifying the observed, serious problems with current actions
by saying "but they should work in theory!"
I'm just disagreeing with the view that Common and the "rest of the
projects" have some big gap in goals, and especially with the view that
the "rest of the projects" are achieving the Movement's goals
successfully in this respect, while Commons is not.
Given the large gray area that is copyright, it's inevitable that there
will be a mess. But I think to the extent projects are "incorrectly"
approaching the issue, the blame is quite distributed. For example, I
would judge the English Wikipedia's current image policy a failure in
practice: a failure in the too-permissive direction. The English
encyclopedia, as it currently stands, is not really free content unless
you strip the images. It cannot in practice be safely reused by
organizations who are not Wikimedia, without extensive case-by-case
analysis. This is because there is a large reliance on a bunch of narrow
and brittle exceptions to copyright law, with images that are not either
solidly public domain, or solidly CC-licensed. Examples: 1) works that
are in copyright in almost the entire world, including their country of
origin, *but* are out of copyright in the USA (only); 2) weak fair-use
rationales that would be hard for a reuser to win a case on (especially
a reuser that isn't a nonprofit educational charity like Wikimedia is);
and 3) images with quite weak sourcing.
I personally would welcome more attention to our actual mission,
producing free content, rather than the mission some of our members seem
to be engaged in, "making the *.wikipedia.org sites look nice in the
short term, even if nobody external can reuse the content". This doesn't
mean Commons isn't erring too far in the other direction, of course. But
I think it's a more complex issue than Commons diverging from the
correct path.
-Mark