On 2/28/14, 1:43 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 28 February 2014 08:27, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
But the other Wikimedia projects are *also* supposed to share that goal: of producing a Free-as-in-freedom encyclopedia whose contents can be safely reused and adapted by a wide range of other people and organizations, who should be able to assume that it is legal to do so without exhaustive case-by-case investigation. The movement's main job is not merely hosting the websites *.wikipedia.org, putting up whatever we find useful to put up, and taking down things when we get complaints or lawsuits.
You're justifying the observed, serious problems with current actions by saying "but they should work in theory!"
I'm just disagreeing with the view that Common and the "rest of the projects" have some big gap in goals, and especially with the view that the "rest of the projects" are achieving the Movement's goals successfully in this respect, while Commons is not.
Given the large gray area that is copyright, it's inevitable that there will be a mess. But I think to the extent projects are "incorrectly" approaching the issue, the blame is quite distributed. For example, I would judge the English Wikipedia's current image policy a failure in practice: a failure in the too-permissive direction. The English encyclopedia, as it currently stands, is not really free content unless you strip the images. It cannot in practice be safely reused by organizations who are not Wikimedia, without extensive case-by-case analysis. This is because there is a large reliance on a bunch of narrow and brittle exceptions to copyright law, with images that are not either solidly public domain, or solidly CC-licensed. Examples: 1) works that are in copyright in almost the entire world, including their country of origin, *but* are out of copyright in the USA (only); 2) weak fair-use rationales that would be hard for a reuser to win a case on (especially a reuser that isn't a nonprofit educational charity like Wikimedia is); and 3) images with quite weak sourcing.
I personally would welcome more attention to our actual mission, producing free content, rather than the mission some of our members seem to be engaged in, "making the *.wikipedia.org sites look nice in the short term, even if nobody external can reuse the content". This doesn't mean Commons isn't erring too far in the other direction, of course. But I think it's a more complex issue than Commons diverging from the correct path.
-Mark