On 8/14/06, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
Note that we already have "free" content on the Commons that is, really, unfree to use in some ways for reasons other than copyright. For instance, take a free photograph of somebody and use it in an advertisement; in many countries, you can get sued for abusive use of that person's image.
The problem is that accepting this sort of restriction without a very clearly spelled out license is bad news. Copyleft licenses should not be usable by people to enact legal retribution if they do not approve of the use. As you've noted, usage is regulated in many places by other laws, which is just fine. We should not allow extensions of that sort of regulation into the realm of copyright, though -- it is not an appropriate place for it, and it makes it a risky license addition, IMO.
Whether content free for educational and informational usage but not for advertisement should be accepted on commons is a different question from whether they should be accepted in the projects. My personal point of view is that the projects should accept such content, for this content is on a much sounder legal ground than a lot of our "fair use" claims.
Yes but you're mixing apples and oranges. Non-free licenses are unacceptable because they are non-free, not because they have shakey legal grounds. Whether fair use is really "free" is debateable (I go back and forth on this), and much of that distinction depends on whether you are considering "free" in a prescriptive sense or a de facto sense.
The strangest phenomena IMO is when the non-commercial are converted to fair use tagging. It's clearly just an artifact of the image policies, and is completely unrelated to their copyright status. "We at Wikipedia believe that we can use this image freely and disregard its license, even though we know damn well that we are within the terms of its license. In fact, we just put up 'fair use' here because that's what a commercial re-user would have to claim. We're not actually claiming that ourselves, since we are still in the terms of the license." I mean, saying that you're going to ignore a license even though you know you're following it to the letter seems like somewhat of a joke to me.
FF (Hi all. I finally joined this list. Thought I'd just jump right in...)