Wily D wrote:
For the most part, there seems to be a strong consensus that we should steer clear of the boundries we could push fair use (or in many of our cases, such as mine, fair dealing) to.
As an educational resource - there's probably a lot of space - I'll warn you that I live in a foreign socialist country where we don't believe in copyrights or suing people, so my advice may not be all that great.
The issue is - we want to provide a free encyclopaedia for downstream users, who may be commercial in nature. How do we be free while still being an encyclopaedia? How do we be an encyclopaedia while still be free? Tricky ...
WilyD
On 9/10/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I am not a US lawyer, nor is [[Pamela Jones]] of [[Groklaw]]. But here's some food for thought:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070907195435565
Despite my personal fondness for slash-and-burning fair abuse on en:wp and taking away children's eyecandy, I remain a big fan of fair use, because quotation is a necessary part of being able to talk about something. [[Golan v. Gonzales]] (that's a red link. Could someone please write the article?) is the US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals saying it is too.
So what's Wikipedia and Wikimedia's duty to exercise that right in the pursuit of educational value?
- d.
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The Germans seem to have solved that question quite well. We took a page out of their book on userboxes, maybe we should take the flipside on nonfree content too. The way you remain free is to steer clear of nonfree. Period, end of story, no exceptions. That's why you don't find, for example, the nonfree nvidia driver in the Linux kernel. It could be legally distributed that way, sure, but it's not free. Anyone who wants it is welcome to download and install their own, but to keep the core product (the kernel) free, it must not be distributed as part of it.
To be genuinely free, anyone should be able to take a database dump of Wikipedia, and provided that they comply with the GFDL, put it up on a commercial website with every last bit of data they got. Wikipedia is currently nonfree. A lot of -parts- are free, but it only takes a bit of pollution to make the whole nonfree.