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