On 9/19/06, dmehkeri@swi.com dmehkeri@swi.com wrote:
Eh, why is that anyway? I understand why we would dislike it, of course, but I'm not sure why, exactly, we would want to make it a deal-breaker. (We, english Wikipedia, rather than say, Wikimedia Commons which has slightly different goals.)
[sni]
Is not *Free Content*, it is incompatible (in both spirit and intention) with the GFDL, and it would inhibit intended applications of Wikipedia.
Even if you forget that Wikipedia has creating Free Content as one of its two primary goals (the other of which is creating an Encyclopedia), and only consider making a no-cost encyclopedia:
Consider what happens if we make a print version of Wikipedia with color images in black and white? Is that a derived work? What if we need to adjust some of the colors in the image to preserve contrast in the black and white conversion?
What about cropping? It is common on english wikipedia to crop images to preserve their informative content in the small amount of screen real estate we have available... (As an aside I think we often take cropping too far)...
Translations, rearrangements, .. etc there is no shortage of examples of places where we've altered images to further our goal of creating an encyclopedia. This is all possible because we require illustrations people create for our project to be Free Content.
[snip]
For starters it isn't mentioned in the copyright FAQ at all.
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The copyright FAQ is mostly written for users of content in Wikipedia. Not creators of Wikipedia content. See [[Wikipedia:Image use policy]] which states "You can prove that the copyright holder has licensed the image under a free license."
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We would, obviously, rather have everything under one license. But we allow incompatible media copylefts, like CC-BY-SA and GFDL, even though it means we can't, say, make a derivative image based on two images with incompatible copylefts.
Although GFDL and CC-By-SA are technically incompatible, they are largely compatible in principle. If your use of an article conforms to the GFDL, then it will easily conform to the CC-By-SA terms of included images.
[snip]
We even allow "fair use" under some restricted circumstances. This does not allow for derivative works either, and in fact poses downstream problems.
Our intention of allowing fair use images is to fulfil our encyclopedic goals for material which can not be made available under another license.
The downstream implication is that if we have a valid fair use claim and they are doing something similar to us, then they should have a fair use claim as well.
[snip]
So it's obvious why we would rather not have no-derivative media licenses, but it's not obvious to me why we would absolutely insist upon it, the way we absolutely insist upon allowing commercial use or what have you.
Because our absolute insistence increases the amount of Free Content.
"Rather not" is meaningless if we do not put teeth behind it.