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

Hallo, Hier mein zweiter Brief an die ESA, diesmal auf Englisch. Bitte konstruktive Kritik, bevor ich ihn abschicke. Englisch ist schließlich nicht meine Mutersprache. ;-) Grüße, Daniel Arnold (Arnomane) ---- Dear Mrs. Imbert-Vier, First of all thank you for your answer. At first I have a technical quesition to your conditions: How can we meet your demand not offer the possibility of downloading the images, because for using them at Wikipedia they have to be displayed in a browser and thatfor downloaded from Wikipedia-servers. 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 Despite that these usage conditions are exactly causing the problem I had described in my german mail, because they are contrary to the principles of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, meaning that it 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 can 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 (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 have unluckily only 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 peeople 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) that has mostly the same and in some aspects already lager dimensions as Microsoft Encarta or Encyclopaedia Britannica and has gained larger media interest in the recent past. Wikipedia has 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. 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. However your answer is, we will respect your copyright (and act according to our principles). Best regards, Daniel Arnold -a free willy Wikipedia contributor