[Foundation-l] Clearing up Wikimedia's media licensing policies (some important points)

I'll be replying to many people at once... Claudio Mastroianni wrote on Thu Feb 8 10:38:25 UTC 2007: I'm sorry, but with permission is by no means an alternative. Under the "fair dealing" (or in the US "fair use") laws of most countries we can use works even with the explicit disapproval of the copyright holder, we can use works with whom we can not contact the copyright holder, and most importantly *this ability is not limited only to us*. Because out full goals go beyond running a website for the world to look at, we must find solutions better than "with permission". Claudio Mastroianni wrote on Thu Feb 8 11:27:21 UTC 2007: ***Your claim that Italian copyright law does not permit fair dealing is incorrect: *** Under Italian law you are permitted 'abridgment, quotation or reproduction of fragments or parts of a work for the purpose of criticism or discussion, or for instructional purposes.' (see Italian Copyright Act Article 70; Nimmer and Geller (1998-), Italy, §8[2][a]) Note that parody is not permitted. But since Wikipedia should not be performing parody, this difference is likely not material. You will be hard pressed to find a country which does not permit excerpting for scholarly purposes, if not by the written law then by the actions of the courts. Such an exception from copyright is utterly necessary for a free society. While a few such places might exist, it is not in Wikimedia's or that world at large's interest to allow the policies of nations which do not respect the basic intellectual freedom of their citizens to have too much influence on our policy. Jon Harald Søby wrote on Thu Feb 8 12:00:15 UTC 2007: It takes some really selective reading to draw this conclusion from the orignal post: Whenever it mentions "fair use" it also specifies [[fair dealing]] which is the name of the same general concept in the law of many other countries. We can't expect, nor should we want, the board to micromanage every detail of every action of ours. If we read the rationale of the board post it seems clear to me that in order to meet our mission our usage should conform to the "fair deailing"/"fair use" available in most of the world. More than half of the Wikimedia board is from outside the United States. You are picking the wrong organization to blame of US centricism. Andre Engels wrote on Thu Feb 8 12:21:46 UTC 2007: When we permit an image as "fair dealing" or "fair use" we do not care what other licenses it is available under. As such, ND images are permitted when they would be permitted as "fair dealing" / "fair use" images no matter what their license. This is made clear in the boards statement "Some works that are under licenses we do not accept (such as non-derivative) may meet these conditions." This sort of thinking about the handling of non-free licenses is not new, Jimbo posted about it years ago. The underlying rationale goes something like this: When we talk about a machine, we can show a picture of it to help people understand, when we talk about a place we can show a picture of it to help people understand... some times we will talk about a copyrighted work, and we should be able to show a picture of it to help people understand what we are saying. Copyright would prevent us, but the lawmakers or courts of most countries have realized that stifling public discourse in this way would be a terribly blow to freedom and the ability to educate the public. So the law permits it in many places... and we tolerate it because we have no other choice if we are to do a really good job of educating people. There mere existence of a ND license for a work is substantial evidence that we may have another choice... It is evidence that we can probably reach the copyright the copyright holder, and it is evidence that they are willing to consider terms that differ from "all rights reserved". If they are releasing under and ND license, it may even be because we already talked to them and failed to help them understand that a basic strong copyleft licenses will take care of most of the things that they really care about, such as preventing the fraud of someone making new versions and blaming them on the original author.. Whenever we see ND (and NC alike) we are seeing evidence of our own failure to advocate truly free licenses. David Strauss wrote on Thu Feb 8 12:42:52 UTC 2007: I would rather we not mention the ND license for an image that we use as fair use. By doing so we would be sending the wrong message: That ND licenses are somehow acceptable to us, even if only conditionally... that they aren't usually a result of a misunderstanding, and that we don't think the creative commons has made a mistake by mixing Free Content licenses under the same brand as far more restrictive licenses. We face a constant issue where people ask us "Why did you delete this? I released it under creative commons licensing so it is free!". People submit what they see, and if they see ND they will submit more of that. Although, I don't think it's the end of the world that we do mention it.. it is a matter of fact, and because most of our permissible non-free images will come from the all-rights-reserved camp, I seriously hope we'll never see many NC / ND + "fair use" images. If we do, then we will know what a grave mistake for the world that the Creative Commons folks made by introducing so many licenses which are not free enough.