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 I think that such a literal view of free resuse means that Wikipedia can for ever be associated with outdated and poorly edited pages.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
On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 07:53, Alex R. wrote:
Ops, sorry, I realize that this was not posted to the list.
Well, I guess I'll post my reply to that back to the list then.
====
Alex, just a few points. I don't want us to get all worked up and argue past each other.
First: the wiki is a means to an end. It's a *really cool* means, but fundamentally it's got a purpose other than just being a fun way to pass the time with some friendly folks.
That purpose is to "create an information source in an encyclopedia format that is freely available. The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed _so long_ as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges Wikipedia as the source. Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom." (Quoted from Wikipedia:Copyrights.)
Third party reuse, modification, and redistribution is a fundamental goal of Wikipedia, not an unsavory side-effect of the license. It is our duty as Wikipedians to think of our readers, our users, our republishers, and provide them with good material that should work well as it is for an encyclopedia, and can be remolded to other uses.
Third party reuse may have different goals from the encyclopedia; for instance adapting encyclopedia articles into textbooks or lesson plans or travel guides; narrowing the scope and adding more technical detail; widening the scope and reducing detail; giving emphasis to a different subject or point of view; altering the language to suit a different age group; translating to another language entirely; adaptation to another medium (voice, or narration for a video); etc. They may be noncommercial (distribution via web gratis) or commercial (distribution of books or DVDs for a fee, with "transparent" editable version of FDL works included or available on request for cost of reproduction).
That's why for instance a number of us (of which I am one) are so suspicious of "fair use" images, where in our editing/publishing software images are not directly tied to their usages, but "fair use" as a legal concept is intimately connected to the circumstances of a particular usage. It creates another potential barrier to re-use, which harms the goals of the project.
Editions of articles that have been released to Wikipedia are released under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. They are never un-published or withdrawn from circulation, though perhaps they get moved to the back shelf while a shinier new edition is put up in the front of the store. They continue to be further published under that license, because Wikipedia has no other license to publish them under.
(The exception would be for materials that Wikipedia can't publish because the license was invalid, in which case they should be withdrawn from circulation. That's why we have a deletion function, and if necessary can pull individual revisions that are determined to not be distributable after all.)
It is an essential freedom that users not be forced to use some particular edition of an article if it does not suit their needs as well as another edition. A newer edition may be a "better" encyclopedia article than the last (at least, in some people's opinions), but this does not and should not nullify the existence of available different editions. I suspect it's not very often that people would dig back for old revisions to work from, but the claim that they _shouldn't be able to_ is horrifying to me.
As far as issues of how many authors need to be credited etc for compliance; that's an issue we'd all like to see better sorted out, but it doesn't seem terribly relevant here. If you redistribute a particular edition, of course you'll only need to credit the authors who contributed to the history of that edition. I don't see how it could be otherwise.
Anyway, I apologize if anything I've said sounds rude or short (or if I just come off as an ignorant ass). It's just that I care a lot about this project and can get a little defensive when I feel it's being threatened. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Alex, just a few points. I don't want us to get all worked up and argue past each other.
First: the wiki is a means to an end. It's a *really cool* means, but fundamentally it's got a purpose other than just being a fun way to pass the time with some friendly folks.
That purpose is to "create an information source in an encyclopedia format that is freely available. The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed _so long_ as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges Wikipedia as the source. Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom." (Quoted from Wikipedia:Copyrights.)
Third party reuse, modification, and redistribution is a fundamental goal of Wikipedia, not an unsavory side-effect of the license. It is our duty as Wikipedians to think of our readers, our users, our republishers, and provide them with good material that should work well as it is for an encyclopedia, and can be remolded to other uses.
Third party reuse may have different goals from the encyclopedia; for instance adapting encyclopedia articles into textbooks or lesson plans or travel guides; narrowing the scope and adding more technical detail; widening the scope and reducing detail; giving emphasis to a different subject or point of view; altering the language to suit a different age group; translating to another language entirely; adaptation to another medium (voice, or narration for a video); etc. They may be noncommercial (distribution via web gratis) or commercial (distribution of books or DVDs for a fee, with "transparent" editable version of FDL works included or available on request for cost of reproduction).
That's why for instance a number of us (of which I am one) are so suspicious of "fair use" images, where in our editing/publishing software images are not directly tied to their usages, but "fair use" as a legal concept is intimately connected to the circumstances of a particular usage. It creates another potential barrier to re-use, which harms the goals of the project.
Editions of articles that have been released to Wikipedia are released under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. They are never un-published or withdrawn from circulation, though perhaps they get moved to the back shelf while a shinier new edition is put up in the front of the store. They continue to be further published under that license, because Wikipedia has no other license to publish them under.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Maybe we should make it easier to include external images. Then, in reprints from the server dump, it would always either be linked externally or ignored. No one's infringing, I don't think, especially if we say that all externally linked images must be under fair use. Externally linked images would also decrease the server load. LDan
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LittleDan wrote:
Maybe we should make it easier to include external images. Then, in reprints from the server dump, it would always either be linked externally or ignored. No one's infringing, I don't think, especially if we say that all externally linked images must be under fair use. Externally linked images would also decrease the server load.
We used to allow these, but got rid of them after a rash of links to <goatse.cx>. That they could change without any sign on Wikipedia (that is, no detection by Recentchanges or a Watchlist) was also a motivating factor.
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
LittleDan wrote:
Maybe we should make it easier to include external images. Then, in reprints from the server dump, it would always either be linked externally or ignored. No one's infringing, I don't think, especially if we say that all externally linked images must be under fair use. Externally linked images would also decrease the server load.
We used to allow these, but got rid of them after a rash of links to <goatse.cx>. That they could change without any sign on Wikipedia (that is, no detection by Recentchanges or a Watchlist) was also a motivating factor.
I also think it is fundamentally immoral to have inline links to foreign images. It circumvents (probably illegally) copyright restrictions and steals bandwidth.
However, I find it fundamentally moral to include a link to the site or page which contains the wanted image. That way, the image owner gets credit and web traffic.
Axel