The reasons put forward on why images must be allowed to be profited from can be summarized thus:
(1) "Maybe you should explain WHY you have the policy of not allowing people to "get rich" off your work first. There's nothing wrong with commerce. In fact, in today's society commerce is pretty much required for survival."
In answer to that; I can only say that this seems to be the very antithesis of what I thought Wikipedia to be; people providing free material, for a free resource. How does Wikipedia justify its policy on not getting rich quick? I am not proposing a shutdown of western society (although given how the planet is going as a result, dredging sandworms for fuel, clearcutting the amazon for profit, one could go that way); I'm arguing that there should be a space for those who wish to contribute out of the good of their hearts, for a better, freer, society. I thought Wikipedia stood for this; apparently I was wrong, as also evidenced by reason (2):
(2) "On the other hand, have you considered getting rich off ours?... I hear that running Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia can be quite lucrative." and "commercial re-use of Wikipedia isn't limited to certain people, you can take part too."
My purchase price, I'm afraid, is a little higher than that. ----------------------
Having dismissed the most objectionable objections, we come to more reasonable ones.
(3) "The goal of Wikipedia is "to create and provide a freely licensed and high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in his or her own language....In order to achieve that goal...This necessarily includes... for-profit ... uses"
I realize this has other implications, in terms of funding, but I'll deal with that later. First, I wish to disabuse the notion that "freedom" cant be gained unless and until everyone has made a buck from something freely given. Is love only truly free when someone pays for it? There is a perfectly acceptable, CC-nc designation, which means that everyone - including Bill Gates - can use the material as they wish. They are just prevented, for now, for all time, from buying out Wikipedia and copyrighting it. I'll come back to that.
(4) "However, allowing for-profit uses can make the information even more widely available; for example, it encourages people to make derivative works that build on it, or to make and sell hard copies to other people."
This becomes even more reasonable. However, at what price does accessibility come? A quick look around the web shows whats happening; commercial sites like About.com are encouraged to derivatize Wikipedia by loading the page with ads, as suggested by one of our commercially-minded contributers above. Does it REALLY help people to have a copy available on Ebay for $5? How about someone selling links to the site to gullible buyers at $1 a pop? I'm not convinced that any for-profit body has materially benefitted Wikipedia by having been derivatized, or sold as hard copies.
(5) "if there are parts that have more restrictive licences (for example, no commercial use), a commercial redistributor would have to go through the entire encyclopedia checking the licence of every single illustration. "
Looking at the wonderful system that is Wikipedia, and all the coding that went into it; it strikes me as strange that no filter can be written, such that a user cannot simply tick a checkbox, yielding a version of Wikipedia for his/her perusal consistent with any of the copyright classifications available. If a user ticks "not nc", for example, he would be able to see/download/pilfer everything which is "not nc" in wikipedia. It doesnt seem insurmountable.
Which brings us to our last, most reasonable proposition
(6) "And our commercial mirrors bring in new business, make donations and have helped pay wages for Wikipedia employees." "put on DVD, and sold for ten euros(?). A large swathe of this went back to the Foundation"
I have no objection to any use of the images, for non-profit use. That is, if Wikipedia makes money from selling disks to people, I'm fine by that, provided that the money is used to fund wikipedia. I *do* have a problem if someone -say a newspaper - lifts one of my images from Wikipedia, and uses it instead of paying for their own photography, and makes a profit therefrom. Now I'm not the legal expert here that most are, and I suppose "non-profit" use may not cover the generation of money by non-profit organizations. In which case, I dare say, the same people could find a way to write this and include it in the Wiki License. The sole remaining objection to me appears to be that people like me arent ponying up to donate cash to provide whats required to run Wikipedia. And that is, I guess, true. So we need to turn to Satan, and prostitute ourselves, so that some people will have access to free material. And in response to those who ask me to consider the profit enterprises as only american-as-apple-pie patriots, Let me just respond that there are already many for-profit encyclopedias in existence. If Wikipedia becomes just another way for a corporation to make money, it will not improve over the already excellent content provided by these worthy capitalists.
Let's be clear about the danger of consorting with the enemy (because like it or hate it, those who would fence in the commons are always at odds with those who would free resources to all); that Danger is seen in how Bill Gates has bought the rights to the digitial reproduction of huge amounts of Art that is (or should be) public domain. Bill Gates has seen to it that Java has become a little part of Windows. Private enterprises now own the right to use turmeric as a medicine; and are patenting life forms. Yes, it is unfortunately true that anywhere one CAN make a buck, someone WILL be trying to capture it. "I hear that running Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia can be quite lucrative." What happens when Bill Gates, or Larry Ellison, or someone else builds a new and better gizmo, which makes the Internet obsolete? Or whatever; just say that the experience of Wikipedia becomes a thousand times better on it, than as it is at present. But the new format is proprietary. Sure the CONTENT is free - but the licensing of the new technology is not. And say that this fictitious company adds new material, such that wikipedia-old becomes obsolete? Who will use the free version anymore? What if Google generates a superpedia; in which it uses Wikipedia as a base, but adds on vast new access to its own-sourced info? Who will use Wikipedia then? Embrace and Extend has killed off more than one open-source before. One of the most significant protections against this is the prohibition against for-profit use.
I would encourage people to consider other possibilities, other than engaging in or with the for-profiteers. One suggestion would be to sell and widely distribute DVDs, by some of the wikipedia wage-earners, all profits going back to pay for the system. Make it $20 for all I care. I dont even mind policies whereby other non-profits can use the free material.
But embracing embrace and extend, is a dangerous gamble.
postscript. I may contribute some images, I'll have to consider the matter more deeply now. Perhaps some images that no commercial company would want to use; or perhaps a resolution unsuited to commercial useage. I'll continue to contribute information; but the idea that someday some Mogul might squeeze Wikipedia out of existence, and incorporate its assets, just as surely as Netscape was lost to AOL-Time-Warner, will probably have an affect on my desire to help create something new. A world asset which was never saleable to the highest bidder.
Mike Finucane wrote:
postscript. I may contribute some images, I'll have to consider the matter more deeply now. Perhaps some images that no commercial company would want to use; or perhaps a resolution unsuited to commercial useage. I'll continue to contribute information; but the idea that someday some Mogul might squeeze Wikipedia out of existence, and incorporate its assets, just as surely as Netscape was lost to AOL-Time-Warner, will probably have an affect on my desire to help create something new. A world asset which was never saleable to the highest bidder.
have you considered using the "fairusein" template, where you can place your images in articles under fair use and don't therefore have to give up any copyright at all.
On 28/11/05, Mike Finucane mike_finucane@yahoo.com wrote:
(6) "And our commercial mirrors bring in new business, make donations and have helped pay wages for Wikipedia employees." "put on DVD, and sold for ten euros(?). A large swathe of this went back to the Foundation"
I have no objection to any use of the images, for non-profit use. That is, if Wikipedia makes money from selling disks to people, I'm fine by that, provided that the money is used to fund wikipedia.
CC-by-nc-2.5 contains this, which I believe is the core of nc:
"You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation."
This is... wow. Vague, to say the best. It's very unclear what this means in terms of distribution. I can make a very good case that the Wikimedia Foundation distributing ten-dollar DVDs as a fundraiser is doing it "directed toward commercial advantage". Used by a non-profit organisation, certainly, but commercial activity does not only mean things where someone makes a profit. There's even situations where giving it away gratis would count as intended for commercial advantage - "free copies" in a newspaper promotion, say.
I *do* have a problem if someone -say a newspaper - lifts one of my images from Wikipedia, and uses it instead of paying for their own photography, and makes a profit therefrom. Now I'm not the legal expert here that most are, and I suppose "non-profit" use may not cover the generation of money by non-profit organizations.
Bingo.
In which case, I dare say, the same people could find a way to write this and include it in the Wiki License.
Mmmuh. What if a local chapter of the Foundation is, for local legal reasons, constituted as a for-profit corporation and not a charity? They may wish to do exactly the same as Wikimedia Germany did - make money by selling copies, plough it back in - but because of legal hairsplitting over "nonprofit" wouldn't be able to. (I mean, do any of us have any idea what Ugandan charity law might be? Is there even Ugandan charity law?)
I would encourage people to consider other possibilities, other than engaging in or with the for-profiteers. One suggestion would be to sell and widely distribute DVDs, by some of the wikipedia wage-earners, all profits going back to pay for the system. Make it $20 for all I care. I dont even mind policies whereby other non-profits can use the free material.
Sure. But to make profits to plough back in, we have to... make profits. Okay, suppose you write a release such that Wikimedia gets the right to do this.
Then Wikimedia collapses in a flaming internal dispute next month - it's not impossible, and it's a problem which is actively forseen at the moment. The project is basically, as I understand it, trying to futureproof against this...
What would happen under the current situation is that there would be a hiatus, and the project would restart once hosting was found, under a new name, and another non-profit would spring up... but one which is legally nothing to do with the previous one, just using the same content. How do all our license waivers, or used-on-X-with-permission images, help then?
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 11/28/05, Mike Finucane mike_finucane@yahoo.com wrote:
postscript. I may contribute some images, I'll have to consider the matter more deeply now. Perhaps some images that no commercial company would want to use; or perhaps a resolution unsuited to commercial useage.
Heh just upload them unser the GFDL. Certian issues with the lisence means that images released under it are pretty much useless for conventional comercial use
I'll continue to contribute information; but the idea that someday some Mogul might squeeze Wikipedia out of existence, and incorporate its assets, just as surely as Netscape was lost to AOL-Time-Warner, will probably have an affect on my desire to help create something new. A world asset which was never saleable to the highest bidder.
GFDL makes sure it can be sold to the highest bidder because there is nothing to stop someone copying what the highest bidder has just bought. I recall that necscape was originaly a comercial company. It's code was released and I belive was the basis on which the monzilla and firefox browsers were built.
-- geni
Mike Finucane wrote:
I thought Wikipedia stood for this; apparently I was wrong, as also evidenced by reason (2):
(2) "On the other hand, have you considered getting rich off ours?... I hear that running Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia can be quite lucrative." and "commercial re-use of Wikipedia isn't limited to certain people, you can take part too."
My purchase price, I'm afraid, is a little higher than that.
Oh dear. I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't trying to buy you -- indeed, I'm not sure I'd have a use for you, and you'd take up space around the house, and need feeding, and so forth -- but rather to point out that if you have an issue with other people making money off Wikipedia, you also have the same opportunity. It's a symmetrical, even, fair deal. One you are Free to take up, or not. Nobody's forcing you. Other people's gain is not your loss, when you are playing a non-zero-sum game.
An encyclopedia which cannot be used commercially is necessarily a limited encyclopedia that limits other people's Freedom; if you want to release your content under one CC-license, and another under another, and yet another contributor wants to release theirs under another license of their own devising, and so on, we end up with an encyclopedia which has to be unpicked by machine filtration driven by legal, rather than encyclopedic, principles before it can be re-used. In any case, it will end up being full of holes once filtration has been performed to remove the incompatible material.
The same Freedom which allows one person to make money from GFDL content allows me to give it away for nothing; indeed, I've spent many thousands of hours writing for Wikipedia, and not asked for a penny for it, because I genuinely believe in a Free encyclopedia, for everyone.
Regarding the rest of your E-mail:
* try actually reading the GFDL, which is the linchpin of the entire project * particularly the bits about transparent copies and derivative works
then keep on re-reading and re-reading it until the penny drops.
It's quite a lengthy document, and I think you'll find that Richard Stallman (no capitalist tycoon he, and a great friend of freedom with a capital F) has been quite thorough in anticipating the possible nasty things that people might try to do, by carefully only allowing them to do things with GFDL content which do not limit the Freedom of others.
-- Neil
On 11/28/05, Mike Finucane mike_finucane@yahoo.com wrote:
In answer to that; I can only say that this seems to be the very antithesis of what I thought Wikipedia to be; people providing free material, for a free resource.
In English there are (at least) two meanings of the word "free", what Stallman distinguishes "free as in freedom" versus "free as in beer". The former, when applied to intellectual property, is a radical notion. The latter is a tired story we all know well.
The "free" in Wikipedia's "Free Encyclopedia" refers primarily to the former. The fact that it is also the latter is almost inconsequential (though in practical operations, it is of course entirely essential).
True freedom, in an intellectual property sense, gives you the ability to make a buck off of something. Shakespeare's works are "free" in that sense because their copyright has expired, so any shmoe on the street can publish his own edition of "Hamlet", or can create a movie version of "Hamlet", or can perform "Hamlet" on a street corner for a few stray bucks. That's the kind of "free" we are talking about, here.
There's no reason that intellectual property freedom has to be opposed to profits. Its calling is a higher one -- a freer culture. If somebody can make a living off of that, then more power to them. Sure, there will be some slimey abuses -- after all, let's not forget how Kenneth Branagh butchered the Bard! But that's life, and in the end, that ends up being pretty inconsequential on the whole.
FF
On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Mike Finucane wrote:
I *do* have aproblem if someone -say a newspaper - lifts one of my images from Wikipedia, and uses it instead of paying for their own photography, and makes a profit therefrom.
While I disagree with much of what you have said, I'll admit you have a point there, Mike. One reason I'll never release images of my friends or family under GFDL or CC is that I don't want to be surprised one day by finding that their image has been photoshopped into an ad or a commercial for a product or company. The only thing worse would be to find that they've been photoshopped into a commercial supporting a politician I despise so vehemently that I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
One could speculate whether this use amounted to some form of libel -- based on the assumption that association with a given product, service, company or politician could be defamatory -- but in the case of dead people, I don't think libel or slander applies. I'm not a lawyer, & I'm not looking to start a discussion here on the matter, I'm just explaining that I've found a simple solution by avoiding the problem.
But what _might_ be worth a conversation -- or at least a moment's consideration -- is that introducing GFDL material into an advertisement makes that creation GFDL'd too. By using free images (free as in speech, not as in beer, as the cliche goes), the advertisement then -- at least in part -- becomes free.
This may not stand up in court (the GPL & its related licenses have never been tested in court to the best of my knowledge), but the legal uncertainty there is strong enough that no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license. There are enough headaches in publishing creative material: why further introduce those surrounding copyright & trademark?
But I do wonder at the concept of a GFDL'd commerical, & how that might play out in business.
There's more I could say, but I think a pointer to the lawsuit between UC Berkeley & AT&T over the UNIX codebase in the early 1990s is sufficient. Half of the people on this mailing list know how free software affected the outcome of that case (& probably can discuss it better than I), & the other half should read about it.
Geoff
On 11/29/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Mike Finucane wrote:
I *do* have aproblem if someone -say a newspaper - lifts one of my images from Wikipedia, and uses it instead of paying for their own photography, and makes a profit therefrom.
While I disagree with much of what you have said, I'll admit you have a point there, Mike. One reason I'll never release images of my friends or family under GFDL or CC is that I don't want to be surprised one day by finding that their image has been photoshopped into an ad or a commercial for a product or company. The only thing worse would be to find that they've been photoshopped into a commercial supporting a politician I despise so vehemently that I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
Wouldn't this violate your friends' and family's right to privacy and/or publicity? Even if you could argue that the GFDL is a license to violate those rights, you don't have the right to grant such a license for your friends and family.
One could speculate whether this use amounted to some form of libel -- based on the assumption that association with a given product, service, company or politician could be defamatory -- but in the case of dead people, I don't think libel or slander applies. I'm not a lawyer, & I'm not looking to start a discussion here on the matter, I'm just explaining that I've found a simple solution by avoiding the problem.
Ah, good point. Right to privacy and/or publicity doesn't apply to dead people either, AFAIK. Of course, if your friends and family are dead I don't see why it matters that your pictures of them are used in a commercial any more than any other pictures you've taken. If your picture of an orange was transformed into a commercial for Microsoft Orange Juice (from concentrate) wouldn't you be just as pissed?
But what _might_ be worth a conversation -- or at least a moment's consideration -- is that introducing GFDL material into an advertisement makes that creation GFDL'd too. By using free images (free as in speech, not as in beer, as the cliche goes), the advertisement then -- at least in part -- becomes free.
The aggregation clause is the big loophole in the GFDL that would probably avoid that.
And - here we go again - the GFDL doesn't work that way anyway. Distributing the advertisement without releasing it under the GFDL might be copyright infringement, but nothing is ever automatically released under the GFDL.
This may not stand up in court (the GPL & its related licenses have never been tested in court to the best of my knowledge), but the legal uncertainty there is strong enough that no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license. There are enough headaches in publishing creative material: why further introduce those surrounding copyright & trademark?
But I do wonder at the concept of a GFDL'd commerical, & how that might play out in business.
I don't really see how this would be much of a big deal, actually. But then again, I'm kind of a fan of the idea that copyleft can and does make business sense (except perhaps for the anti-business, hippy culture surrounding it evidenced in part by this very thread).
There's more I could say, but I think a pointer to the lawsuit between UC Berkeley & AT&T over the UNIX codebase in the early 1990s is sufficient. Half of the people on this mailing list know how free software affected the outcome of that case (& probably can discuss it better than I), & the other half should read about it.
Geoff
Anthony
On 11/29/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
The aggregation clause is the big loophole in the GFDL that would probably avoid that.
However, to be in compliance, they would have to make the portion of the commercial derived from GFDL content freely available, I would have thought?
-Matt
On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 10:01:32PM -0800, Geoff Burling wrote:
While I disagree with much of what you have said, I'll admit you have a point there, Mike. One reason I'll never release images of my friends or family under GFDL or CC is that I don't want to be surprised one day by finding that their image has been photoshopped into an ad or a commercial for a product or company.
As others have noted here, the relevant law preventing this unjust act has nothing to do with copyright (or defamation) and everything to do with [[personality rights]]. There are GFDL-licensed photographs of Richard Stallman available on the FSF's Web site, but I would still be violating Stallman's rights if I were to take one and turn it into a poster implying that Stallman endorsed my favorite project.
Hell, even if I were to take a picture of Stallman myself (and thereby hold the copyright outright!) I would still not be within my rights to use that image to misrepresent Stallman as promoting my project.
But what _might_ be worth a conversation -- or at least a moment's consideration -- is that introducing GFDL material into an advertisement makes that creation GFDL'd too. By using free images (free as in speech, not as in beer, as the cliche goes), the advertisement then -- at least in part -- becomes free.
This seems to be a common confusion. A person who inserts GFDLed work into their own published work does not *thereby* grant a GFDL license for their work. (If that were the case, GFDL would be a contract of adhesion, which it is not; it is merely a copyright license.)
Rather, if I insert GFDLed work into my own published work and *fail* to grant a GFDL license for my work, I thereby infringe upon the GFDLed work's owner's copyright.
What happens next is for me and the copyright holder to negotiate. It may be that the copyright holder is willing to grant me a license to republish their work on different terms, perhaps for a fee, so that I am no longer infringing. It may be that they convince me to relicense my work under the GFDL and thereby stop infringing. It may be that (if they have a registered copyright) they sue me and collect statutory damages for my infringement. Or it may be that they simply go get an injunction forbidding me from publishing my infringing work at all.
In any case, there's *nothing* in either the GFDL nor the copyright law that would *automatically* place my work under the GFDL without my explicit action to do so. Copyright permits the original author to forbid the publication of derivative works -- it DOES NOT permit the original author to appropriate those works' copyright and set their licensing terms.
This may not stand up in court (the GPL & its related licenses have never been tested in court to the best of my knowledge), but the legal uncertainty there is strong enough that no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license.
Hardly! The GPL has certainly been tested in a number of legal cases; and GPLed material is used (and distributed) by a huge number of businessmen and -women.
The only case which actually reached a final decision by a court was in Germany, between the authors of the Linux Netfilter (iptables) code and a company called Sitecom. In that case, the court upheld that Sitecom had infringed the Netfilter authors' copyright by failing to adhere to the terms of the GPL.
(See [[General Public License]].)
Other cases involving the GPL have led to settlements ... which is not unusual since most lawsuits end in settlements. However, these settlements have been uniformly in support of the GPL's strength.
One of the earliest involved NeXT and the FSF. NeXT released a modified version of the GCC compiler as their Objective-C compiler, without meeting their GPL obligations. FSF pursued them for it; they settled, with NeXT agreeing to release their changes under the GPL. That release ended up being quite profitable: After NeXT folded back in to Apple Computer, they were able to use GCC's Objective-C compiler (which had in the meantime been maintained by the FSF) in Mac OS X.
A more recent case was the one between NuSphere and MySQL AB, which also ended up in a settlement favorable to the GPL.
(And then there are the several ongoing cases in which SCO is presently embarrassing themselves.)
The claim that "no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license" seems rather unusual. Today, some huge number of businesses do use and distribute material (specifically, software) released under just such licenses. While some proprietary software firms have attempted to panic the marketplace about GPL-type licenses, their motives for doing so are pretty transparent and their arguments not especially credible. What are yours?
Karl A. Krueger wrote:
The claim that "no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license" seems rather unusual.
Having sat in a number of meetings with businesspeople considering the use of GNU-licensed material, I can attest that the decision is usually made with considerable anguish and argument. The most painful decisions are when they realize that the techies have boxed them in already, and it's either use GNU, or fire all the techies and spend enormous sums re-creating from scratch - at these moments it's terrible hard not to grin as free software racks up another victory. :-)
Stan
Stan Shebs wrote:
Karl A. Krueger wrote:
The claim that "no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license" seems rather unusual.
Having sat in a number of meetings with businesspeople considering the use of GNU-licensed material, I can attest that the decision is usually made with considerable anguish and argument. The most painful decisions are when they realize that the techies have boxed them in already, and it's either use GNU, or fire all the techies and spend enormous sums re-creating from scratch - at these moments it's terrible hard not to grin as free software racks up another victory. :-)
<whisper>why they don't just use FreeBSD ...</whisper>
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
Karl A. Krueger wrote:
The claim that "no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license" seems rather unusual.
Having sat in a number of meetings with businesspeople considering the use of GNU-licensed material, I can attest that the decision is usually made with considerable anguish and argument. The most painful decisions are when they realize that the techies have boxed them in already, and it's either use GNU, or fire all the techies and spend enormous sums re-creating from scratch - at these moments it's terrible hard not to grin as free software racks up another victory. :-)
<whisper>why they don't just use FreeBSD ...</whisper>
<whisper>No compiler or debugger...</whisper>
Stan
On 11/29/05, Karl A. Krueger kkrueger@whoi.edu wrote:
The claim that "no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license" seems rather unusual. Today, some huge number of businesses do use and distribute material (specifically, software) released under just such licenses.
It could be argued that they do not however do so likely. Certian element of the GFDL make it a pain in the neck to use for traditional media. Particulary when you get the insane numbers of authors certian wikipedia articles can rack up.
-- geni
geni wrote:
It could be argued that they do not however do so likely. Certian element of the GFDL make it a pain in the neck to use for traditional media. Particulary when you get the insane numbers of authors certian wikipedia articles can rack up.
Well, the GFDL did anticipate this possibility, and has a clause to avoid burdensome requirements like listing 500 people as authors---if there are more than 5 authors, the reuser of the content may choose and credit 5 of them.
That's not to say that the GFDL is not burdensome to commercial reusers, but it's not burdensome for that specific reason.
-Mark
On 11/29/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
geni wrote:
It could be argued that they do not however do so likely. Certian element of the GFDL make it a pain in the neck to use for traditional media. Particulary when you get the insane numbers of authors certian wikipedia articles can rack up.
Well, the GFDL did anticipate this possibility, and has a clause to avoid burdensome requirements like listing 500 people as authors---if there are more than 5 authors, the reuser of the content may choose and credit 5 of them.
Define author. I assume that when I rollback vandalism I don't become an author for that article. Anyone feel like digging though the GWB article to find 5 legit authors?
-- geni
geni wrote:
Define author. I assume that when I rollback vandalism I don't become an author for that article. Anyone feel like digging though the GWB article to find 5 legit authors?
Well, it is incumbent on the creator of the work to define "author" and list them in the section labeled "history"; reusers only have to maintain that information, not invent their own. In this case, if Wikipedia puts you in the "history" section when you just rollback vandalism, then it's designating you as an author. If that's not what we want, then the "history" section should be changed, or a new "this is the history for the purpose of the GFDL" section invented.
-Mark
On 11/29/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Well, it is incumbent on the creator of the work to define "author" and list them in the section labeled "history"; reusers only have to maintain that information, not invent their own. In this case, if Wikipedia puts you in the "history" section when you just rollback vandalism, then it's designating you as an author. If that's not what we want, then the "history" section should be changed, or a new "this is the history for the purpose of the GFDL" section invented.
-Mark
But things like rollback and minor fixes are not posible to copyright. Wouldn't an author have to have some level of copyright ownership over that article (yeah ok I admit I only skimed the GFDL)?
-- geni
On Nov 29, 2005, at 5:44 PM, geni wrote:
Define author. I assume that when I rollback vandalism I don't become an author for that article. Anyone feel like digging though the GWB article to find 5 legit authors?
You actually do become the copyright holder for that version of the article. It's just that the extent to which this fact matters is rarely very important, since you GFDLed that version of the article as well.
-Phil
On Tue, 29 Nov 2005, Karl A. Krueger wrote:
On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 10:01:32PM -0800, Geoff Burling wrote:
While I disagree with much of what you have said, I'll admit you have a point there, Mike. One reason I'll never release images of my friends or family under GFDL or CC is that I don't want to be surprised one day by finding that their image has been photoshopped into an ad or a commercial for a product or company.
As others have noted here, the relevant law preventing this unjust act has nothing to do with copyright (or defamation) and everything to do with [[personality rights]]. There are GFDL-licensed photographs of Richard Stallman available on the FSF's Web site, but I would still be violating Stallman's rights if I were to take one and turn it into a poster implying that Stallman endorsed my favorite project.
Obviously you can't imagine how images can be reused in print. Let me explain.
Some harried worker at an advertising agency needs some faces to add to an advertisement for their client, Quick & Puke Foods. Said worker surfs the web, grabs a couple of faces, & inserts them into the background, & an altruistic person discovers his dead grandmother staring at him from that ad for Quick & Puke -- to his consternation.
Perhaps suing the ad agency, Quick & Puke & everyone else involved will achieve some desired results. Or the judge will decide that no harm was done & dismiss the case. Me, I'm perfectly happy keeping those images to myself & remaining ignorant about how a court might actually rule.
But what _might_ be worth a conversation -- or at least a moment's consideration -- is that introducing GFDL material into an advertisement makes that creation GFDL'd too. By using free images (free as in speech, not as in beer, as the cliche goes), the advertisement then -- at least in part -- becomes free.
This seems to be a common confusion. A person who inserts GFDLed work into their own published work does not *thereby* grant a GFDL license for their work. (If that were the case, GFDL would be a contract of adhesion, which it is not; it is merely a copyright license.)
Rather, if I insert GFDLed work into my own published work and *fail* to grant a GFDL license for my work, I thereby infringe upon the GFDLed work's owner's copyright.
What happens next is for me and the copyright holder to negotiate. It may be that the copyright holder is willing to grant me a license to republish their work on different terms, perhaps for a fee, so that I am no longer infringing. It may be that they convince me to relicense my work under the GFDL and thereby stop infringing. It may be that (if they have a registered copyright) they sue me and collect statutory damages for my infringement. Or it may be that they simply go get an injunction forbidding me from publishing my infringing work at all.
In any case, there's *nothing* in either the GFDL nor the copyright law that would *automatically* place my work under the GFDL without my explicit action to do so. Copyright permits the original author to forbid the publication of derivative works -- it DOES NOT permit the original author to appropriate those works' copyright and set their licensing terms.
Different language, same result: the advertising campaign comes to a halt, the ad company & their client loses money -- all while this matter is hashed out. And if it were *my* material that got sucked into this creation, I'd insist on allowing reuse under the same terms they accepted when they use my material: release the finished product under GFDL.
This may not stand up in court (the GPL & its related licenses have never been tested in court to the best of my knowledge), but the legal uncertainty there is strong enough that no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license.
Hardly! The GPL has certainly been tested in a number of legal cases; and GPLed material is used (and distributed) by a huge number of businessmen and -women.
The only case which actually reached a final decision by a court was in Germany, between the authors of the Linux Netfilter (iptables) code and a company called Sitecom. In that case, the court upheld that Sitecom had infringed the Netfilter authors' copyright by failing to adhere to the terms of the GPL.
The phrase "tested in court" refers to a judge making a ruling whether the terms of the GFDL (or the GPL, as you mention in this case) are enforcable. As I said, I'm unaware of either license being recognized in a court in a manner to create a precedent; your example is the first I have heard about. And I'm glad it stood.
[snip]
The claim that "no businessman will lightly use material released under a Gnu-like license" seems rather unusual. Today, some huge number of businesses do use and distribute material (specifically, software) released under just such licenses. While some proprietary software firms have attempted to panic the marketplace about GPL-type licenses, their motives for doing so are pretty transparent and their arguments not especially credible. What are yours?
You really haven't read about the University of California at Berkeley vs. AT&T lawsuit, have you? It is an interesting case. AT&T, then the owner of UNIX, sued UCB over copyright infringement for their version of UNIX. At first, it looked like a sure win for AT&T, but after the process of discovery had finished, it was discovered that AT&T had incorporated large chunks of code that belonged to Berkeley -- without furnishing the copyright notice that UCB required for reuse. The judge opined that the university had viable grounds for a countersuit, & AT&T was forced to negotiate a settlement (otherwise known as a surrender).
This case illustrates a little-known fact in the software industry: the source & ownership of much of the proprietary code out there is not certainly known. And I'm sure that more than one corporate manager would admit that some parts of code look embarassingly similar to the same code found in textbooks or even competitor's codebases. This is not to say that anyone *intentionally* stole software from anyone else -- just to say that there are an awful lot of questions about lines of code that people would prefer not to ever need to answer.
SCO was banking that this was the case at IBM. Unfortunately for them, IBM has been playing a similar game *cough* patents *cough* for decades, & early on had taken the necessary measures to prevent something like this being done to them. (It also helped that SCO's tactics were sloppy & badly executed, but that's not relevant.)
Another factor about business fear of GPL/GFDL is that it's something new & that many of them don't understand it. I think that, with a bit of imagination & research, one can easily make money with GPL/GFDL; but until someone makes billions with it -- much as a bunch of guys outside Seattle made money from their strategy with computers -- I won't be finding too many businessmen agreeing with me.