Dear Željko,
I wish to make a reply to some of the comments you raise - primarily to
emphasise to the rest of the subscribers on this list that there is already
an extensive community discussion about this Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (FAZ)
opinion column on the German Wikipedia 'Kurier' forum, starting from here:
I encourage anyone who wishes to discuss the issues raised on the original,
and the reply, articles - to do so at that forum.
Relatedly, there is also this point-by-point rebuttal thread on Twitter,
which has been shared by WM-DE too:
[with each
tweet being machine-translatable inside twitter's own interface].
But mostly, I wish to emphasise this letter, which written by the volunteer
community leaders behind the "Wiki Loves Broadcast" (WLB) project. The FAZ
opinion column is referring at a community-originating volunteer campaign
to obtain free-licensing for audiovisual material produced for public
service broadcasters. And so, I feel their response which should be the
thing which is emphasised:
To the other issues raised:
The concept of a free-license means that anyone can use use the material
for any purpose, including commercially: and as we know, many already do.
The FAZ opinion column conflates this fundamental principle of
free-licenses with an entirely separate project being run at the WMF. The
"Enterprise" API project is not licensing content - everyone can *already* use
it. Rather, it is a *service* with higher-speed/volume data throughput than
could (or should) be provided for free for commercial organisations, who
wish to use it. As we say: "Same water, thicker pipe." And ironically, for
the argument being made in FAZ, this API does not include any multimedia
content on Wikimedia projects. I say "should", because if it were a service
provided at no-cost to largest commercial users, that would mean
subsidising their business model with donors' money.
Also, since Željko asked if there was any comments provided by the WMF, I
would like to point out that myself and the WMF Comms team were
coordinating with WM-DE last week about this reply article in FAZ. And
furthermore that the *Enterprise *project FAQ on Meta - which is also fully
translated into German, and has many responses regarding the financial and
legal aspects
Sincerely,
- Liam / Wittylama
*Wikimedia Enterprise *Project Manager, WMF
[1] somewhat relatedly, I ran a similar campaign with the ABC in my home
country Australia a decade ago, and every now and then I still see the
video files from it appearing in unexpected places across the internet:
Thank you for engaging with this topic in public and
doing the translation
and sharing here (adding open-glam list).
Aside from being a nice Sunday read I think this is a super useful case
study for people working in the cultural sector and advocacy for open. Was
this published elsewhere in English?
I would love for us to have a better platform to comment and discuss
individual aspects of both articles (Discourse as WM Spaces would be good -
no?), but anyway few inline comments below.
On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 7:24 PM Christian Humborg <
christian.humborg(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:
Hi everyone,
we had articles in Germany published connecting the activities of
Wikimedia Enterprise with our licensing advocacy. Please find below the
article of a filmmaker, published last week in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, one of the large German newspapers.
I see the article did not get a huge amount of comments and in that way it
failed to attract much attention or there were echoes elsewhere?
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/wikimedia-plant-die-kommerzia…
Below you find our response, published this week
in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung. I hope this is useful for further debates.
One needs to register (or even pay?) to get to this article? I wonder
what was the quality and quantity of responses here?
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/wikimedia-ard-und-zdf-freie-lizenzen…
Kind regards
Christian
*******************************************
*Wikimedia perverts the common good*
<https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/wikimedia-plant-die-kommerzialisierung-ihrer-inhalte-17736141.html>
*Wikimedia plans to commercialize its content. At the same time, the
organization is lobbying hard to get its hands on high-quality free content
from public broadcasters. This is ruining the filmmakers*.
The Wikipedia information platform has so far been financed by donations
from Silicon Valley tech giants, among others. These include primarily the
market-dominating Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple et
cetera, all of which earn money through traffic with content from
Wikipedia. In specialist circles, these donations are regarded as a
reciprocal business: Donors and Wikipedia profit from each other.
This is crude simplification...
It would have been great for this to be responded to with some counter
arguments or maybe it is still possible by WMF directly?
Wikimedia is the operating organization behind
Wikipedia, but it has long
been looking for a stable business model to finance itself. In the spring
of 2021, Wikimedia finally announced that it would build a corporate
interface that would simplify the automated use of Wikipedia content and
for which commercial companies would pay. In other words: money is to be
made with the content on Wikipedia. For example, with services such as the
voice assistants Siri
<https://www.faz.net/aktuell/technik-motor/thema/siri> or Alexa, which
access content via Wikipedia. The donation business based on reciprocity,
as described above, would thus be transformed into a proper business
relationship. The name for it: Wikimedia Enterprise API.
I feel this is something WMF should also respond to with clarification, at
least to the author and his society if not in FAZ, than on
wikimedia.org.
For this business to be profitable in the long term, Wikimedia must
ensure the comprehensive supply of information on
Wikipedia, but also
enhance it for the social networks
<https://www.faz.net/aktuell/technik-motor/thema/soziale-netzwerke> with
high-quality images and films. Expanded offerings increase demand. And in
order to secure the capital-rich clientele in the long term - according to
the law of Internet capitalism - Wikipedia could also become the dominant
platform in the education sector for images and films that can be accessed
as free as possible.
This also posed some interesting questions for Wikimedians to discuss with
so many failures in making Wikipedia media rich. Wikipedia copy-cat
websites are in abundance (can it get worse?) and on the other hand there
is next to zero effort (and resources allocated) to have position and
relations formulated towards non-corporate social networks (not even when
it is easy!).
Contempt for the state and collectivism
Wikimedia Deutschland's intensive lobbying campaign for so-called "free
licenses", which has been ongoing for several years, should also be
understood in this context. Public films, especially documentaries, are to
be offered free of charge on Wikipedia via CC licensing (Creative Commons
licenses). Many know this campaign under the formula "Public money = Public
good". A vulgarization of the idea of the common good that devalues the
legal status of goods whose production takes place through state
redistribution or in publicly supported economic segments such as the film
and television industry. The claim is an expression of a typical
contemporary amalgamation of libertarian contempt for the state and
collectivist ideals, which in this case hides quite shamelessly behind
rhetoric about the common good and flickering fantasies of the "free
Internet”.
CreativeCommons needs to address (with Wikimedians) some of these concerns
much better and with more agility in next years as the set of licensing
options is still narrow and totally content and context 'ignorant'. In that
respect some of these concerns are at least partially valid.
In recent years, Wikimedia's lobbying
activities around the reform of
European copyright law have resulted in striking rejection from German
production and copyright associations. With the public broadcasters, on the
other hand, they have been somewhat successful: At the intensive
instigation of Wikimedia, there have been pilot tests with CC-licensed
clips from productions of the "Terra X" documentary series (ZDF) in the
last two years. And indeed, CC clauses are increasingly found in the fine
print of individual Terra X production contracts. This is the result of
so-called "round tables" at which, it should be noted, no representation of
the German producer community was present. Wikimedia, at any rate, is
celebrating its statistics today; the Terra-X clips are generating
respectable user numbers on the Wikipedia page.
It would be great to have links for all this... I was not aware of Terra X
- sounds great as reference for other locals to advocate with public
broadcasters.
The German film and television industry and all
those creatively involved
are now rubbing their eyes in the face of how this rose-tinted deception is
catching on, not only among broadcaster executives but also in media policy
circles. They have all failed to ask the obvious question: Why does
Wikimedia need CC-licensed public service content at all? Wikimedia could
also simply enter into a blanket licensing agreement with the relevant
collecting societies such as VG Bild-Kunst. Just like schools,
universities, and libraries do. And just as Wikimedia itself wants to
conclude user agreements with Google
<https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/thema/google>, Apple, Amazon or
Facebook for facilitated access to content held on Wikipedia. It would be
easy to solve all the legal issues. And thanks to the collecting societies
that represent the interests of filmmakers, authors and ancillary copyright
holders would also have their fair or livelihood-protecting share of the
money flows.
This is hugely misinformed, but points to a need for better work on the
side of Wikimedia to communicate this more clearly and prominently inside
of existing interfaces and promotional work.
Propaganda for "free licenses"
Wikimedia has rejected VG Bild-Kunst's offer to license protected works.
As long as its campaign in Germany has not completely failed, the
organization is apparently continuing to speculate on CC-licensed,
high-quality public-domain freeware, for which it does not have to conclude
licensing agreements with the collecting societies precisely because it is
already CC-licensed. A good deal for Wikimedia and the Internet giants. A
disastrous one for the production landscape.
I fail to understand this without more context and links...
Notwithstanding. Self-publication of content via
Creative Commons on
subject-specific platforms or in social media makes perfect sense for
certain content such as academic publications or even NGO or hobby films.
Professional film works, on the other hand, always represent bundles of
legally guaranteed legal rights for script, direction, production, camera,
music et cetera. Films created under professional market conditions are
simply not suitable for simplified publication via Creative Commons
licensing.
This is not totally wrong. CC and others should address these issues with
more complex mixed licensed works.
Wikimedia ignores these facts in its ongoing
propaganda about "free
licenses" and waves away the criticism with colorful flags that say "common
good". In their own interest. At the expense of us filmmakers, at the
expense of authors and copyright holders.
The German film and television landscape is facing enormous challenges
due to the growing importance of platforms and the resulting dynamics in
the audiovisual market. Perhaps as never before. At this time, it is
crucial that those with political responsibility as well as the public
broadcasters use these challenges in intensive dialog with filmmakers as an
opportunity to sustainably strengthen the production landscape in all its
diversity. Even better, to allow its creative power to unfold better than
before.
What filmmakers need for this are stable legal foundations and fair
market standards. The stickers with the vulgar formula "public money =
public good" call these foundations into question. They should now finally
be scraped off the windshields of media policy in Germany.
These few points are overly simplified and fairly naive in statements
about market, production landscape diversity, creativity and what not, but
is it maybe worth addressing the use of 'vulgar' in any follow-ups.
David Bernet is a documentary filmmaker and
co-chair of AG DOK
(Professional Association of Documentary Filmmakers in Germany).
***************************************************
Free licenses for the common good
<https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/wikimedia-ard-und-zdf-freie-lizenzen-fuer-das-gemeinwohl-17753492.html>
by Dr. Christian Humborg, Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland
Public money - public good! With this formula, Wikimedia Deutschland is
campaigning for knowledge content that is financed with tax money or the
broadcasting fee to be available to everyone. Some see their business model
threatened by this demand. "This is ruining filmmakers," reads an opinion
piece published this week by documentary filmmaker and co-chair of AG DOK,
David Bernet.
This is a view that ignores the possibility of new financing models,
especially for filmmakers and media professionals - and above all the
absolute necessity of finally adapting the public broadcasting system in
Germany to the realities of the 21st century. Politicians and the
broadcasting commissions of the federal states themselves have long
recognized that something has to be done. Broadcasting content only via the
traditional channels of radio and television no longer does justice to the
mission of the public broadcasters. If you want to create good, reliable
content for everyone, you have to offer it in the way it is used today:
Accessible at any time, shareable, adaptable.
These are good points. Would be good to have a selection of examples
useful for advocacy as case studies or references to point to.
It is alarming that, in this situation, creative
people are being ground
down in the dispute between content exploiters such as film companies and
publishers, platforms, public broadcasters and politicians. But it is
incomprehensible that David Bernet points the finger at Wikipedia and
Wikimedia, of all places.
For me this is the key point in many ways to get creative people (not just
their individual representatives) informed and supported in their work.
Right now 'creatives' are now too often too dependent on corporate social
media for visibility and promotion, so if there are no alternatives or even
different directions for the future it is hard for them to be critical of
big publishers and platforms.
The knowledge content financed by taxes and
broadcasting fees is
manifold, but access and use are anything but self-evident: Why are
publicly financed research data behind paywalls of private specialist
publishers? Why is the Axel Springer publishing house forced to acquire
rights for the broadcast of the historically significant Elefantenrunde on
election night? Why don't public broadcasters make these rights available
from the outset, especially when it comes to purely in-house productions?
Wikimedia is not concerned with entertainment or weekly sporting events.
But publicly funded knowledge content should be free. It should be
permanently findable, usable and available regardless of location.
Good point that in-house productions should be easier to clear and license
under CreativeCommons in a semi-automatic way.
Freely licensed - and adequately funded
Creatives - apart from a few superstars - still earn far too little money
from their valuable work. Interest groups and employer organizations, above
all public broadcasters, urgently need to work on fair remuneration. At the
same time, it is also a matter of greater public appreciation of their
work. I hardly know any creatives who are only concerned about the money
and not also about attention. Provided that they are fairly remunerated,
free licenses can address both points.
If creators receive five euros for their content and another one euro each
for two subsequent uses, what would be so bad
about it if they received
seven euros instead and the work was free for that? Also in terms of
predictable financial planning, I would prefer the latter. In fact,
creatives are regularly confronted with so-called total buyout clauses as
the only contract model, but without free licensing and without reuse
options.
Free licenses can help address both points. There are other aspects and
opportunities for remuneration for direct creation of work, but also beyond
this (we should not only be centered on content, just because Wikipedia was
historically centering only content and not communities, nor acknowledging
context differences). For example Ireland just developed a kind of
'universal' basic income for the artists.
https://basicincome.org/news/2021/11/universal-basic-income-pilot-for-artis…
Regardless of the financing, the free licensing
of content often fails
due to the lack of suitable contract templates. Experience shows that those
who have to deal with the necessary formalities for every project again -
and sometimes against resistance - quickly give up. Public broadcasters
therefore urgently need to develop contract templates that enable editorial
teams and commissioned creatives to produce content under free licenses in
an uncomplicated and legally secure manner.
True, yet public broadcasters will not do much if they are not pressured
by 'creatives' who need to be informed in order to be proactive. This
really needs Wikimedians to work bottom up also.
One thing is clear: Whether creators are
adequately compensated for their
services by public broadcasters should not depend on licensing. Free
licenses bring great advantages for broadcasters and society, such as
simpler and longer-lasting usability, simpler rights clearance, and
potentially greater visibility. These advantages should also be remunerated
accordingly. In any case, creators and editors must be enabled to use free
licenses without fear of loss of income.
Not just without fear of loss of income, but with substantial motivation
from added visibility and increased sustainability of their work (where
Wikimedia should help more).
One reason for the difficult negotiating position
of creative
professionals is the lack of a strong lobby. For the many creatives,
negotiations on an equal footing would only be possible if individuals did
not pull out. Just how difficult it is to act collectively in the face of
monopolists was demonstrated again in the newspaper market last week, for
example, when it became known that Madsack had signed a contract with
Google for Showcase. The intention to bundle the negotiating power on the
side of the content users in Corint Media did not work out at that point.
The role of collecting societies is extremely important and it is to be
welcomed that they are no longer allowed to represent only their members in
some sectors.
I am not sure I understood it all fully, but guessing in Germany
'collecting societies' do not have monopolies (unlike in many other
countries).
It's also about reach
Wikimedia has always urged rights compliance and at the same time called
for the modernization of copyright where it no longer functions reasonably
in a digital age. On the other hand, it was the large advertising platforms
such as YouTube whose rise and growth would hardly have been conceivable
without disregard for legal standards. Precisely because Wikimedia respects
copyright, it relies on free licenses that make it possible for everyone to
use and edit content permanently and in a legally secure manner.
Furthermore, Wikimedia welcomes all considerations for a non-commercial,
European media platform as a basis for the exchange of publicly funded
content. Instead, public broadcasters in EU member states mostly limit
themselves to short-term collaborations, limited also by national
exploitation licenses, while at the same time uploading content to globally
available commercial platforms such as Youtube.
I am sorry to say but if 'Wikimedia welcomes all considerations...' this
will never or not likely happen anytime soon. Wikimedia and EU based
affiliates can not be a bystander (especially considering the visibility
and experience of 20 years), but need to commit to work on this issue with
others and bridge those short term (EU funded projects of collaborations).
The example of Terra X from ZDF shows that there
are distribution
alternatives, such as the Wikimedia platform Commons. The Terra X clips
posted there alone currently achieve more than two million views per month.
To put it in perspective, that's two million views more than if they were
to appear only in the media libraries of the public broadcasters for a year.
Making Terra X clips available benefits the quality of Wikipedia, no
question. But it primarily benefits the viewers - and it's good for Terra
X's sustainable reach. Reaching many people is the mission of public
broadcasters. Not to mention, Wikipedia articles committed to a neutral
point of view are certainly a more suitable environment for public service
information content than YouTube and other commercial platforms.
The collaboration between ZDF and Wikipedia on the Terra-X broadcast
comes from a volunteer group. This group, "Wiki Loves Broadcast," points
out in its response to
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Loves_Broadcast/Statement_zum_FAZ-Beitrag_vom_18.01.2022>
David Bernet's post that it is solely up to the volunteer community to
incorporate content like ZDF's clips into Wikipedia. Neither Wikimedia
Deutschland nor the Wikimedia Foundation can influence this.
WMF and WM DE should not influence the project direction directly but give
support to these initiatives if it did not before.
Thank you for sharing this info.
Knowledge that belongs to everyone
Wikimedia is financially independent. Wikimedia is financed by donations
and membership fees from the millions of people who use Wikipedia and other
wiki projects. In concrete terms, Wikimedia Deutschland is backed by just
under 100,000 association members. In total, more than 500,000 people
supported Wikimedia Deutschland financially last year. In 2021, there was
actually money from platforms. While the figure in 2020 was 0%, in 2021 it
accounted for about 0.2% of revenue. I do not see any threat to
independence in this order of magnitude.
Hm...
Internationally, too, millions of small donations
ensure precisely this
independence. For the coming year - as in previous years - we expect
payments from companies and donations of more than $1,000 to account for
less than 20% of the Wikimedia Foundation's total income.
It would be great to actually not claim just financial independence (valid
only for WMF), but also interdependencies of participatory work of
supportersvolunteers, contractors and staff with partners in the greater
ecosystem of Wikimedia.
Two things are certain: Wikimedia cannot sell
content at all, because
Wikimedia does not own any content, unlike any creative person. No profit
flows from Wikimedia to individuals, but all income is used solely for the
non-profit projects. Personally, I'm glad that among the world's major
internet platforms there is at least one that is not concerned with profit.
True. Good point to insert 21 years of continuity in this direction for
both CreativeCommons and Wikipedia ;-)
As for the comments of Andreas...
On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 9:39 PM Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'd rather like to see you lobby to have
programs permanently available
on ARD's/ZDF's (German broadcasters') own media repository sites, where
they can easily be linked to. The concentration of public media access in
the hands of just a small number of US-based Big Tech companies that hoover
up everything – which is the practical result of the strategy you advocate
– is politically and economically unhealthy.
This is a really excellent point and worth investigating in and beyond WM
DE only with partners at least in the EU where such regulations and
commitments could be supported by the EU.
As for nobody at Wikimedia profiting off the free
content created by
volunteers, that is relative. WMF salary costs currently average over
$200,000 per employee. In most parts of the world, that would be considered
wealthy. A minor issue in the grand scheme of things, certainly, but still
relevant to us here at least.
Rather then just discussing payroll of Wikimedia (in separate thread) I
think it is useful to discuss what is the spectrum of options and what are
the bottlenecks for the compensations to both diversify and distribute with
equity in mind as well as for WMF to be acting with bigger commitment as
supporter of all Wikimedia entities, participants and partnerships, than
just easy and obvious ones.
Best
Z. Blace
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