Ops, sorry, I realize that this was not posted to the list. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alex R." alex756@nyc.rr.com To: "Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 10:58 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikilists and GDFL
From: "Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com
Alex, every version of every page that has been released under the FDL through this project *has been released under the FDL*.
Has been? So when it was released it could be used and that use is covered, but not someone coming later and picking and choising out of the page histories.
redistributed by anyone who received it under that license, and Wikipedia's servers continue to redistribute them under that license as part of Wikipedia.
The link is not stable, they would have to change the link once it goes into the page history. Does anyone do that, i.e. this page is from a Wikipedia article named: [[fair use]]. Not, this page is stored in the page history. Didn't I read someone someone suggesting that stable URLs are very important to content continuity? That does not occur once a page goes into history, the URL changes at that point. I think that is very significant.
It is the very essence of what we're trying to do that material from the project can be reused and redistributed under that same free license. To claim that this should be taken away after another revision has been made is to pervert the system, to demolish the community editing system, to strangle the right to fork, to pull the rug of liberty from under the feet of reuse.
But a Wiki is about change and collaboration. I think that such a literal view of free resuse means that Wikipedia can for ever be associated with outdated and poorly edited pages. No! The point is that if someone finds a Wikipedia page they can change it and improve it, not decide to make fun of us (or hail to the glory of the by gone age when pages were really good). They have to re-edit that is what Wikipedia is about, not linking to old page histories.
In short, I can only assume we're misunderstanding each other badly, because I can't believe anyone would try to make the argument that legitimately edited, publically released, FDL-licensed past revisions are no longer redistributable under the terms of the license that they have been released to the world under. That would be to argue against everything this project stands for.
Publically released? Not everythiing on the internet is "publicly released". True it is all available and the liberal availability of fair use on the internet means that people can get prior versions, but does that mean that they are the authorized versions? The GFDL requires that the current version of an article some how be acknowleged. I think that is pretty clear.
Also we are not talking about third parties. Most of my argument was about the duties of the Wikipedia community amongst its fellow coauthor community and the obligation we have towards each other in relation to the public. There is an us and them. We have contributed we share a coauthorship bond, we have duties towards each other. Third parties do not, we should not encourage them to act in a way that compromises our collaboration.
I think that when someone uses a page history file they might have a strong case for fair use, but the more I think about it the more I think that so doing they are violating both the spirit of Wikipedia and the letter of the GFDL.
The arguments about it being _unfair_ to later contributors to not use their work don't make any sense to me, and appear to explicitly reject what the project's use of the FDL license explicitly embraces: the
The key word is develop. The GDFL was written for manuals. It was not envisioned to be used in a collaborative social software content collaboration project. Anyone could read lots of things into the license, as both you have I have done. I think we have both demonstrated that there are lots of problems with the GFDL. What should have been done is someone should have written a license that was clearly written with such a collaborate project in mind, but now it is not possible to do so as the license is permanently grafted onto more than 150,000 articles (and that is in English only).
ability to reuse and if desired separately develop free encyclopedia materials under a free license.
Even without the FDL people can develop separate encylopedias. Encyclopedias are compendiums of knowledge. Anyone can take the knowledge of Wikipedia and re-use it. I see no problem with that that is allowed under copyright law, fair use is a lot more flexible than I think most people here understand. Copyright law on the internet is fairly weak because it is so easy to copy materials and most people who post on the internet would have a difficult time in policing their copyright, even if they assert copyright they use it anyway.
I think that if you look at most of the downstream users of Wikipedia material you will find that they do not comply with the letter of the FDL anyway; if some contributor wanted to they could probably get these materials yanked off the internet because their rights are being violated under the license.
I have not found one cite where they do cite at least five of the principal authors of the material on their site, they do not have any clear link back to the Wikipedia page that they have reproduced (though most link back to Wikipedia, they have confused Wikipedia with all of its diverse contributors). Even within Wikipedias there are many translations of articles. These translations are violations of the GFDL because they do not respect the original authors' rights as stated under the GFDL.
The text of the GDFL is a complex license that many people do not understand and do not know how to apply, that is pretty clear. I once had some clients (software developers) who entered into a contract with an information producer. They all downloaded some contract they had found on the internet. Both my clients and the producer had no idea what the contract meant, they had assumed it applied to them because they heard that the site that posted the contracts was used by software developers. The only problem was that the factual circumstances differed much from what software developers did. The result? No one knew what their rights were, or their responsibilities and not even lawyers could straighten it out. Lawyers are not miracle workers, when something is confusing or wrong, confusing, inappropriate or poorly drafted the lawyers cannot necessarily fix it.
Alex756