[Wikide-l] Fwd: Re: use of ESA-images in Wikipedia

Hallo, Danke für die Korrekturvorschläge von Martin Linnemann. Die Antwortemail unten hab ich soeben an die ESA geschickt. Ich melde mich in der Sache wenn es was Neues gibt. Grüße, Daniel Arnold (Arnomane) ---------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht ---------- Subject: Re: use of ESA-images in Wikipedia Date: Samstag, 30. Oktober 2004 19:58 From: Daniel Arnold <arnomane(a)gmx.de> To: Nadia.Imbert-Vier(a)esa.int Dear Mrs. Imbert-Vier, First of all thank you very much for your answer. At first I have a technical quesition to your conditions: How can we meet your demand not to offer the possibility of downloading the images, because they have to be displayed in a browser in order to use them at Wikipedia and therefore downloaded from the servers of Wikipedia? Here is also an example link how an image is provided in Wikipedia by WikiMedia-Software ( it is a special page which can be embedded in text-pages): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Smart1.jpg Apart from that these usage conditions are exactly causing the problem I had described in my previous (mostly German) mail, because they are contrary to the principles of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, wich means that its content has to be free according the definitions of the GNU Free Documentation license ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#FDL ). Note: Free doesn't mean at no cost, but free in the sense of freedom. The main principles of this license are: 1) Credit to the orgininal authors has to be given 2) Freedom of usage: Everyone is allowed to use the work for every purpose. 3) Freedom of modification: Everyone is allowed to modify the work according to his/her own needs. 4) Freedom of distribution: Everyone is allowed to distribute the work (original and modified) at the price he/she likes, provided that every interested person gets a transparent (open data format) machine readable copy of the work and that for modifications/derivative work the same rights are given to everyone. Note: Personal rights (e.g. of persons shown in images) and trademark rights are untouched by this license. Many ESA-images were uploaded by several people at Wikipedia in the false assumption, that your conditions are compatible to the GNU-FDL, which is clearly not the case. So we unfortunately only have two options: a) deleting all ESA images in Wikipedia, although Wikipedias goal is education and the Foundation of Wikipedia is a non profit organisation, simply because of the far reaching rights we give to everyone (and of course we deliberately don't want to restrict them). b) the images can be released by ESA at conditions compatible to the GNU-FDL. Of course b) is only a wish not a demand. You are the copyright owner. You can do whatever you want with your content. If we have to choose a) many people using and enhancing Wikipedia would be very disappointed, because the articles (as the ones I was pointing out in my previous mail) would suffer a dramatic loose of astethetical and informational quality - and of course there would be a loose of balance in the content presented by Wikipedia, since the NASA allows the use of it images within the public domain. If you didn't already get in contact with this project: Wikipedia is a large community driven project (founded by an Open Source enthusiast called Jimbo Wales from the US) in order to create a free encyclopedia. It has mostly the same and in some aspects already lager dimensions as Microsoft Encarta or The Encyclopaedia Britannica and has gained larger media interest in the recent past (e.g. "The New York Times", BBC, ARD - German state television, "Le Monde", "France 5"). Wikipedia contains at the moment more than one million articles in all languages (only German pages already more than 150'000, there also exists a large french subproject at http://fr.wikipedia.org ) and belongs to the top 500 of visited internet pages according to independent analysis (e.g. place 406 according to http://www.alexa.com ). Wikipedia is the (already successful) attempt to port the idea of free software (for example the famous Linux operating system, which is also used in many places by ESA) to literature. So would it be possible to release the ESA images within the Public Domain or the GNU-FDL? ESA would for sure win with this step and would gain even more public popularity also outside the European Union. However your answer is, we will respect your copyright (and act according to it). Best regards, Daniel Arnold -a voluntary Wikipedia contributor -------------------------------------------------------