In addition to Patricia's excellent argument about diplomaticy vs bullying, I'd like to say that bad laws that are not respected are not going to be changed.
Imagine the situation: Nice Wikimedian asks Lawmaker to change the law to reinforce the Public Domain. CL will say "I can't be bothered, these laws are legacy stuff and not enforced anyway, like those about killing Scottish bowmen". Eventually, - the written law stays the same; - what the laws says is barely tolerable or intolerable; - people start uploading things in disregard of the law because what the law says seems excessive, and because, hey, the lawmaker said it's OK, right?
Wrong. The lawmaker said no such thing. What he said was a vague promise designed to appease both chicken and foxes. The firmly true part of what he says is "I can't be bothered". He wants to be re-elected, so he needs not upset anybody (also, there are lots of things with a better "effort/political benefit" ratio to do).
Now, enter the Evil Editor. The EE wants to make an example of a Wikimedian in order to intimidate the rest of us, cast a bad light on the Wikimedia projects so that the public opinion sees us as a bunch of "pirates", and eventually reinforce his position with even more drastic copyright laws. What would you do in his position? Of course, you would quietly wait until some unsuspecting Wikimedian uploads something appropriately copyrighted and somehow controversial; when a favourable situation arises you simultaneously launch - a legal campaign towards the Wikimedian and possibly Wikimedia in general, - a media campaign aimed at the public opinion ("save our starving artists!") - a lobbying towards lawmakers and politicians.
By behaving in an overconfident manner towards local copyright laws (i.e. anything short of "quite paranoid"), we are buying empty promises as if they were firm, and we are handing weapons to potential enemies waiting to ambush us. Only by putting lawmakers in front of what they have written do we have a chance of improving things. Local laws are a problem? Well, ignoring the problem could prove dangerous, and will certainly never solve it.
-- Rama
On 22/08/2008, Patricia Rodrigues snooze210904@yahoo.se wrote:
Bryan, I agree with you that we are not following the spirit of the Definition of Freedom strictly. That is the main problem, and we keep on introducing exceptions to the general licensing spirit for the sake of convenience. Two wrongs does not make one right - where does it stop?
Yes, it's rather unfortunate that we have already lost one administrator because of possible legal issues. One issue is: people working with free software/free culture in affected countries are faced with the issue that they are promoting something (liberation of material to the public domain or under free licenses by those who have such material closed in cellars in museums or available only through gatekeepers, so that it's usable by Wikimedia Commons) that in the end is useless to promote because it's possible to use it anyway, on a clause that is perfectly fine in the US but absolutely not in those countries. So instead of smoothly and diplomatically convincing such institutions, we're bullying them into it. A bad strategy, and bad publicity for Wikimedia, imho.
The other issue is: what to do if you are an admin from one of the affected countries and receive a request from the authorities in that country to take down some PD-Art media from the site (copyrighted in that country)? Do you refuse your local authorities saying "it's in a server in the US, ha-ha", risking whichever consequences, or do you violate Commons "policy" so you won't disobey local authorities, and delete the media?... Is it possible to be an admin in such conditions?
It's very nice to talk about lobbying for Free Culture and having some courage against such unfair and ridiculous legislations when you're sitting comfortably on US soil.
Well, there you go, more questions to be answered.
Regards, Patrícia
--- On Thu, 21/8/08, Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote: From: Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] PD-art and official "position of the WMF" To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org, "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Thursday, 21 August, 2008, 9:18 PM
We have never followed the Definition of Freedom to the letter and neither to its spirit. The Commons community has always followed their own way interpreting freedom just like they did in the PD-art discussion. Which ended up in a decision that will allow us to use become a broader repository but arguably also will drift us away from freedom in its strict sense and may have rather unfortunate consequences for our fellow UKians and Scandinavians. I know at least one admin who did not want to take the risk of administering a repository that would cause him to break his country's law. In the end this was the decision of the Commons community itself only. The Foundation allowed the project decide for themselves which they did.
Free to reuse is rather vague. The community has always drawn the line of freedom themselves (indeed in some cases directly violating the Definition of Freedom and the Licensing resolution).
Bryan
(As a side note I had seen this coming. It has always been a matter of when, not if)
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