On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 8:26 AM, George William Herbert <
george.herbert(a)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