On 11/29/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Mike Finucane wrote:
I *do* have aproblem if someone -say a newspaper - lifts one of my images from Wikipedia, and uses it instead of paying for their own photography, and makes a profit therefrom.
While I disagree with much of what you have said, I'll admit you have a point there, Mike. One reason I'll never release images of my friends or family under GFDL or CC is that I don't want to be surprised one day by finding that their image has been photoshopped into an ad or a commercial for a product or company. The only thing worse would be to find that they've been photoshopped into a commercial supporting a politician I despise so vehemently that I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
Wouldn't this violate your friends' and family's right to privacy and/or publicity? Even if you could argue that the GFDL is a license to violate those rights, you don't have the right to grant such a license for your friends and family.
One could speculate whether this use amounted to some form of libel -- based on the assumption that association with a given product, service, company or politician could be defamatory -- but in the case of dead people, I don't think libel or slander applies. I'm not a lawyer, & I'm not looking to start a discussion here on the matter, I'm just explaining that I've found a simple solution by avoiding the problem.
Ah, good point. Right to privacy and/or publicity doesn't apply to dead people either, AFAIK. Of course, if your friends and family are dead I don't see why it matters that your pictures of them are used in a commercial any more than any other pictures you've taken. If your picture of an orange was transformed into a commercial for Microsoft Orange Juice (from concentrate) wouldn't you be just as pissed?
But what _might_ be worth a conversation -- or at least a moment's consideration -- is that introducing GFDL material into an advertisement makes that creation GFDL'd too. By using free images (free as in speech, not as in beer, as the cliche goes), the advertisement then -- at least in part -- becomes free.
The aggregation clause is the big loophole in the GFDL that would probably avoid that.
And - here we go again - the GFDL doesn't work that way anyway. Distributing the advertisement without releasing it under the GFDL might be copyright infringement, but nothing is ever automatically released under the GFDL.
This may not stand up in court (the GPL & its related licenses have never been tested in court to the best of my knowledge), but the legal uncertainty there is strong enough that no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license. There are enough headaches in publishing creative material: why further introduce those surrounding copyright & trademark?
But I do wonder at the concept of a GFDL'd commerical, & how that might play out in business.
I don't really see how this would be much of a big deal, actually. But then again, I'm kind of a fan of the idea that copyleft can and does make business sense (except perhaps for the anti-business, hippy culture surrounding it evidenced in part by this very thread).
There's more I could say, but I think a pointer to the lawsuit between UC Berkeley & AT&T over the UNIX codebase in the early 1990s is sufficient. Half of the people on this mailing list know how free software affected the outcome of that case (& probably can discuss it better than I), & the other half should read about it.
Geoff
Anthony