On 02/04/2008, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 01/04/2008, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
On 02/04/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion/2008_Ma...
I've put in keep opinions for all the ones listed there.
What this is is a recurrence of an issue that comes around every so often; whether non-copyright restrictions are important as regards freedom for images. The NASA case (and other US government insignia) can be regarded as a special case of trademark protection in most ways. Wikipedia's track record is that the depiction of trademarked items does not render an image unfree for our purposes, and this should follow the same logic.
I had a screenshot of wikipedia I made and uploaded for debugging purposes deleted as unfree...
Which it is. Screenshots of wikipedia pages are a complete copyright mess. Unfree bits GPL bits GFDL bits CC bits.
Makes you wonder how a GPL programme with GFDL encyclopaedia data and possibly CC images which all in themselves are free, got to be so messed up despite its progress so far. Maybe the whole free culture thing is really a joke as the people who declare it don't have the monetary resources to enforce it or even decide themselves what status compilations are.
Not to mention that like a few others, I allow all of my contributions to be CC BY-SA/GFDL dual liccensed :)... I do like the trend on the non-Wikimedia parts of the web to make all free culture items CC based though. Gets away from the horrid complexities of the GFDL programme documentation focused license so at least you have a hope of clearly making up your own mind that your data can easily be entrenched in someone elses site. Did wikipedia really think GFDL was going to spread through the web given its complexity?
Seems reasonable to me. Maybe I should have anonymised Wikipedia by blocking out the copyright part of the interface and declared the rest as PD/GPL. The generic visual representation of a user interface produced entirely by GPL software should not be under any copyright restrictions ;-)
Well the normal GPL ones (if all else fails http://id.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/headbg.jpg is protectable by copyright)
The wikipedia foundation really has made sure they believe doublethink completely without question in this respect if they make it look for all purposes like wikipedia is free culture but then copyright the basic aspects so you ironically can't use "it", just the data... It is interesting that they have so many copyright elements though in a serious sense too. Makes you wonder what exactly they fear from copyleft and why they can put on a straight doublethink face for the media who don't understand these nuances.
Peter