On 8/14/06, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux(a)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...)
