In reply to: "Let's not get narky, eh? I didn't like his tone, either,"
I'm sorry if my tone offends some; the record, it was generated by the following, which *I* didnt much like, either:
"All images which are for non-commercial only use and by permission
only
are not acceptable for Wikipedia and _will be deleted_. We have tolerated them for some time..."
I'm not writing here for the purposes of offending anyone; the purpose is to provoke some thought, if not discussion (I'm sure this has already been done, dont worry) on a policy which I find antithetical to the notion of a commons. A secondary purpose is to provide feedback on why I personally, have been dissuaded from contributing material to Wikipedia. I was in the process of going through my photo archive and linking them up to articles in Wikipedia, when I came across the requirement that they be open to profit-making; which pulled me up very quickly. The above statement stopped me in my tracks. If that information is useful to you, then well and good. If not, it really doesnt make much difference to me.
In reply to:
Because Wikipedia is free as in freedom. Your pictures are not free (though apparently they are gratis); you are limiting who can
distribute
them. Please re-evaluate contributing to Wikipedia if you are
unwilling
to support freedom.
My answer is that I do not see how enriching private corporations furthers freedom. My pictures are indeed gratis. The only objection I have is to allowing others to make profits from my work. That definition of freedom isnt in my dictionary. Ask the Java community how they feel about Gates embracing and extending their freedoms.
When freedom is defined by the ability of corporate persons to enrich themselves at the expense of the community, whether thats by patenting life forms, folk medicine, or whatever, then we have truly lost the idea of freedom. It is of interest that the images allowable are still restricted - by for example the "by" atrribution. Its only the "nc" that seems to draw howls of protest.
I cannot understand why people freely contributing material to be used by anyone else for whatever purposes they wish - EXCEPT to make a fast buck - is considered "if you are unwilling to support freedom."
I suppose we each have our definitions of what freedom truly is. Mike
--- Mike Finucane mike_finucane@yahoo.com wrote:
My answer is that I do not see how enriching private corporations furthers freedom. My pictures are indeed gratis. The only objection I have is to allowing others to make profits from my work. That definition of freedom isnt in my dictionary. Ask the Java community how they feel about Gates embracing and extending their freedoms.
When freedom is defined by the ability of corporate persons to enrich themselves at the expense of the community
With "copyleft" licenses like the GFDL, you can make a profit from the use of the work, but you certainly cannot do so at the expense of the community. That is, you can't restrict how other people use the work, and if you make changes, you have to publish them under the same license. That is, even the most cynical, selfish, profiteering use of a copyleft work by some unethical company cannot take anything away from the community. Moreover, there are plenty of benevolent cases for commercial reuse: e.g. DVD sales to fund Wikipedia servers, etc.
It can be a case of definitions, but in my view, freedom is the ability to act without restriction, and therefore prohibiting people from reusing images in a commercial context is taking away from their freedom.
-- Matt
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
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Mike Finucane wrote:
In reply to:
Because Wikipedia is free as in freedom. Your pictures are not free (though apparently they are gratis); you are limiting who can
distribute
them. Please re-evaluate contributing to Wikipedia if you are unwilling to support freedom.
My answer is that I do not see how enriching private corporations furthers freedom. My pictures are indeed gratis. The only objection I have is to allowing others to make profits from my work.
There is a German company who, now for the third time, sells a copy of the German Wikipedia on DVD. They sell it for €9,90 and make little profit of that (last time they gave €1 per DVD sold to Wikimedia). Mostly, it is a PR thing, as well as the ability to offer a current encyclopedia (they usually specialize in public domain texts on CD).
We have the encyclopedia. They have the software and the infrastructure to distribute it on DVD. The end user has the ability to buy a good encyclopedia on DVD for a decent price.
You can not honestly tell me that the above is a bad thing. In fact, many German wikipedians, myself included, have actively helped that company to get these DVDs ready, as unpaid volunteers, because it is a good thing.
However, your images would have to be excluded from such a DVD.
Face it: Noone will become insanely rich by selling images from Wikipedia, yours or other people's. And even if one or the other image turns up in some high-quality production, GFDL or CC-BY-SA make sure they'll have to credit the author, which would mean free advertising for you.
On the other hand, there is a market for low-priced works, encyclopedia, wikibook, wiki-reader or whatever, that will extend the range of people we can reach to those whithout (permanent) internet access. If someone provides, say, printed wikipedia editions, and charges his printing costs plus a few bucks to keep his business afloat, so what? Would you go to peolpe who would buy such a printed edition, or who would be given one by some organisation that buys them, ans say "sorry, folks, you could have had an encyclopedia, but someone would have made $5 of it, and that's unacceptable"?
I, for one, will keep co-licensing my pictures under GFDL and CC-BY-SA, so *our readers* can (hopefully) profit from them. Truth is, noone would by my pictures anyway. So if someome manages to sell them, lucky him. I don't mind.
Magnus
On 11/29/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Face it: Noone will become insanely rich by selling images from Wikipedia, yours or other people's. And even if one or the other image turns up in some high-quality production, GFDL or CC-BY-SA make sure they'll have to credit the author, which would mean free advertising for you.
And not only that, but his production would also have to be licensed under the same criteria. I think few profit-making companies would really want to do that with individual photographs etc.
-- Sam
Mike Finucane wrote:
In reply to:
Because Wikipedia is free as in freedom. Your pictures are not free (though apparently they are gratis); you are limiting who can
distribute
them. Please re-evaluate contributing to Wikipedia if you are
unwilling
to support freedom.
That last sentence is an arrogant and insulting non-sequitur. What may very well be an unwillingness to support one aspect of freedom should not be used as a straw man to impugn a person's support of freedom in general.
My answer is that I do not see how enriching private corporations furthers freedom. My pictures are indeed gratis. The only objection I have is to allowing others to make profits from my work. That definition of freedom isnt in my dictionary. Ask the Java community how they feel about Gates embracing and extending their freedoms.
The objective should not be to prevent corporations from using the material, but to create a situation where use of the material could taint the copyrightability of the context in which they place it
When freedom is defined by the ability of corporate persons to enrich themselves at the expense of the community, whether thats by patenting life forms, folk medicine, or whatever, then we have truly lost the idea of freedom. It is of interest that the images allowable are still restricted - by for example the "by" atrribution. Its only the "nc" that seems to draw howls of protest.
I don't disagree with your analysis of intellectual property abuse by corporation, but it's naïve to think that simply denying them the freedom to use the material will accomplish anything toward your goal.
Ec
Mike Finucane wrote:
The only objection I have is to allowing others to make profits from my work. That definition of freedom isnt in my dictionary.
Mike, there are probably dimensions to this which you have not considered.
Right now, African schools (for example) suffer under a situation in which proprietary textbooks generate absurd profits for publishers who keep prices high. They therefore cannot afford new up-to-date textbooks and generally go without or use very old used textbooks.
A non-commercial-only license does not help them nearly as much as a free license, because a free license makes possible a competitive marketplace. Enterpreneurs can find an opportunity in taking your freely licensed photos and freely licensed wikipedia/wikibooks/wiktionary/etc. content and building it into something useful, at a *far lower cost*.
If you think it's dishonorable to make money by providing a useful service in a non-proprietary way, then of course we'll never agree.
But it sounds to me like what you are opposed to is not *profit* per se, but *locking things up*. If you said, "I don't want to contribute my work to the commons if that means that some company can make a proprietary version and not give any changes they make back to the community" then I would agree with you completely: this is why I like copyleft.
--Jimbo