--- Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2006/4/19, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
Going out of our way to ensure that downstream
users will be able to
copy this material is ultimately an untenable
position. People must
accept responsibility for their own actions. We
do well to warn them of
possible problems, but we should have no
obligation to hold their hands
in the way that we would hold those of a child.
We can say that we have
reasonable and supportable grounds for saying that
a given document is
in the public domain, or that it is covered by
fair use (or dealing) in
the server jurisdiction, and that we cannot vouch
for its legal status
in some other jurisdiction. In saying this I make
a specific statement
that I do not consider public interest alone to be
grounds for
publishing most documents.
And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at the heart of the Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure you have the right to republish (although I think "they haven't complained yet" isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise you to take stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for free material. Which means that others have the right to republish. That that is under different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but requires it to be under the same license, Wikisource only requires that it may be copied unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may not be reproduced by others at all, I think you are not following the spirit of Wikimedia.
First off I want to say that the English Wikisource does not take anything under fair use/dealing. Although I think that making information available is the true heart of Wikimedia, the ability to freely disseminate it right up there. And I would never want to accept material where an author gave permission for publication on Wikisource without giving any distribution rights. However I believe it is not possible to guarantee worldwide that the downstream user can just take Wikimedia information without looking into their local laws. Even with GFDL. Some countries simply do not have provisions for recognising a license like the GFDL. Right now Wikisource only has material that we believe is freely distributable for commercial use somewhere. I cannot guarantee it is freely distributable *everywhere* but I do not believe that would be possible no matter how restrictive we are. I feel we just need to stress the importance of keeping everything properly tagged so downstream users can sort it out. We have been told no non-commercial and we got rid of that. My concern is that the thinking behind non-commercial was that we need to be able to give such a blanket guarantee. Also there are odds and ends that I do not understand where they fit in to copyright at all.
BTW we are not talking about any licenses here that are not used at WP and Commons (mainly various PD reasons). Whether the people there do not see the issues I do or simply never looked very far into it, I do not know.
Birgitte SB
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