On 11/29/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Mike Finucane wrote:
I *do* have a
problem 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