Gregory Maxwell wrote:
These are unfree licenses. Like any other 'non commercial' license they create a huge area of grey... For example, if we sell a Wikipedia DVD to help fun the project is that commercial exploitation?
One problem is that "commercial" does not mean the same to everyone. I've discussed with people for whom evidently "commercial" meant "advertisement", and encyclopedias, news articles and other educational books, even distributed commercially, were not "commercial".
This is no new revelation. Photographs of copyrighted art must be released under a free license by all copyright holders. Photographs which incidentally include copyrighted works do not concern us.
Have you checked internationally whether this last sentence applies, and to which extent? There was a famous case in France when an architect/sculptor sued a postcard publisher, and the supreme court ruled against him by saying that the sculpture happened to be there but was not in itself the topic of the photo, but the fact that it had to be decided so high in the court system shows that it's a potentially litigious area.
-- DM