Wily D wrote:
On 9/10/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
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.
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The Germans have done a remarkably poor job in some areas due to this. Some of their articles, even on fairly important topics, can never hope to be any good. We're trying to write a free encyclopaedia, which necessarily includes it being an encyclopaedia. Fair use and fair dealings exist for a reason - legislators recognise that we cannot hope to write something like an encyclopaedia without these rights. And we can't.
Right now, people can and do take dumps of Wikipedia and put it on commercial websites with no real legal liability. The only issues are for highly transformative uses, or for very small fractions - an *article* with fair use images can reasonably be extracted and mirrored, but a fair use image alone cannot be extracted and say - put on a postcard.
So the english Wikipedia isn't a source of strictly free content. But it is a free encyclopaedia, and we are taking strong steps to ensure that downstream users who want to reuse content outside of an encyclopaedia can easily identify and remove anything they can't use. And in the end, it doesn't cost us any free content - nonfree content is only permitted where free content could never be produced anyhow
In the end, if the community has to choose between producing strictly free content and producing a free encyclopaedia, I'd put dollars to dimes they'd choose the latter.
WilyD
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In a few areas, I might even choose the latter.
As to the WMF logos, trademark is a different beast then copyright. (This is why I hate that lazy "intellectual property" term, not only does an idea fit very poorly into the idea of property, but it encourages the conflation of several very different laws into some meaningless umbrella designation.) Copyright is designed to lock things up, trademark is simply to prevent deception of consumers and unfair degradation of the reputation of the trademark holder. If I make a crap version of Linux, I shouldn't be able to smear Linus Torvalds or deceive its users by distributing it as "Linux". I could still use the trademark nominally (for example, "Based on the Linux kernel"), just like people can say "Wikipedia" to comment on us.
This all being said, if someone ever did propose the German solution on nonfree images, I'd have to think very carefully over whether I'd be for or against. It would be nice to have a totally free project (and if one can build software that way, one can build an encyclopedia that way), but a few articles would suffer greatly. In the meantime, though, we should quit passing ourselves off as "free" (at least the libre sense of free), when we're not. We can certainly decide what we want the project to be, but in the meantime we should not be dishonest about what it is, and it is currently only gratis-free.