On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 8:26 AM, George William Herbert < george.herbert@gmail.com> wrote:
Conflating and comingling our educational role with open content advocacy was always risky and is proving impossible.
Insightful point. (We have a similar situation with our competing values of privacy and clear disclosure.[1])
Without devaluing open content, we need to separately support fair use for
educational purposes, and stop letting cross-project advocacy games screw with our educational mission.
Can you clarify -- who do you intend by "we"? If your answer is "English Wikipedia," I think we already have a somewhat workable solution to this complex problem: fair use is permitted in certain cases.[2] Of course, you probably mean something broader. But the solution English Wikipedia has chosen is available, by virtue of a WMF resolution,[3] to every Wikimedia project. So if fair use is the issue, why not simply propose permitting it at specific local projects?
Third parties may or may not be able to re-redistribute, but we simply put it up with an explicit "reuse at your own risk".
Indeed, and copyright is not the only thing impacting whether or not something can be reused. Personality rights, trademarks, patents, and common courtesy are all things that might impact reuse, even for a file that is fully in the public domain (i.e., not protected by copyright) in every jurisdiction on the planet. "reuse at your own risk" is a principle we can never broadly disavow.
-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]
[1] I blogged about this topic here: http://ournewmind.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/anonymity-and-public-service/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NFUR [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy