--- Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/1/06, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
Derivative works are by no means essential for Wikisource.
I disagree. A document that cannot legally be translated, for instance, cannot be called a free document. Wikisource is, by definition and philosophy, a repository of free works, similar to what Commons provides for non-textual materials. If you use the logic "but the document is important", you are on a slippery slope of changing Wikisource into a repository for materials under _any_ license which allows free downloads, including "permission granted to Wikimedia" and similar non-free arrangement.
That is not the case whatsoever. We are commited to hosting freely distributable works. Please not put words in my mouth. You are trying to define "free" in way to exclude such documents, that does not make them non-free in general. In all truth no matter how you limit the licenses, the material of Wikimedia will not be universally free everywhere. Such a blanket guarantee is not possible, so we must do our best to keep things both as free and available as possible. It is a balancing act not a black and white line. Why else is there an exception for fair use?
The fact that we cannot translate a work for the French Wikisource does not lessen the
value to
the English Wikisource. There is already a policy
in
place which allows the works of French writers to treated as public domain in the English Wikisource
yet
forbidden the French Wikisource per disscusion on
this
very list.
That's interesting. Could you point me to this policy? I recall the discussion, but not the conclusion.
Erik
We do not have any sorts of crosslanguage policy, but that was the end result. Yann was told that the French Wikisource must remove the works while some of them have always been available on the English Wikisource in translation and have never violated the enWS copyright policy. There now exists a soft fork of Wikisource. I will not try to pin this on any one decision over these matters, but I understand the frustrations which the editors must have felt lead them to such action.
BirgitteSB
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