Hi everyone,

we had articles in Germany published connecting the activities of Wikimedia Enterprise with our licensing advocacy. Please find below the article of a filmmaker, published last week in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the large German newspapers.

Below you find our response, published this week in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. I hope this is useful for further debates.

Kind regards

Christian

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Wikimedia perverts the common good

Wikimedia plans to commercialize its content. At the same time, the organization is lobbying hard to get its hands on high-quality free content from public broadcasters. This is ruining the filmmakers.

The Wikipedia information platform has so far been financed by donations from Silicon Valley tech giants, among others. These include primarily the market-dominating Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple et cetera, all of which earn money through traffic with content from Wikipedia. In specialist circles, these donations are regarded as a reciprocal business: Donors and Wikipedia profit from each other.

Wikimedia is the operating organization behind Wikipedia, but it has long been looking for a stable business model to finance itself. In the spring of 2021, Wikimedia finally announced that it would build a corporate interface that would simplify the automated use of Wikipedia content and for which commercial companies would pay. In other words: money is to be made with the content on Wikipedia. For example, with services such as the voice assistants Siri or Alexa, which access content via Wikipedia. The donation business based on reciprocity, as described above, would thus be transformed into a proper business relationship. The name for it: Wikimedia Enterprise API.

 For this business to be profitable in the long term, Wikimedia must ensure the comprehensive supply of information on Wikipedia, but also enhance it for the social networks with high-quality images and films. Expanded offerings increase demand. And in order to secure the capital-rich clientele in the long term - according to the law of Internet capitalism - Wikipedia could also become the dominant platform in the education sector for images and films that can be accessed as free as possible.

Contempt for the state and collectivism

Wikimedia Deutschland's intensive lobbying campaign for so-called "free licenses", which has been ongoing for several years, should also be understood in this context. Public films, especially documentaries, are to be offered free of charge on Wikipedia via CC licensing (Creative Commons licenses). Many know this campaign under the formula "Public money = Public good". A vulgarization of the idea of the common good that devalues the legal status of goods whose production takes place through state redistribution or in publicly supported economic segments such as the film and television industry. The claim is an expression of a typical contemporary amalgamation of libertarian contempt for the state and collectivist ideals, which in this case hides quite shamelessly behind rhetoric about the common good and flickering fantasies of the "free Internet”.

In recent years, Wikimedia's lobbying activities around the reform of European copyright law have resulted in striking rejection from German production and copyright associations. With the public broadcasters, on the other hand, they have been somewhat successful: At the intensive instigation of Wikimedia, there have been pilot tests with CC-licensed clips from productions of the "Terra X" documentary series (ZDF) in the last two years. And indeed, CC clauses are increasingly found in the fine print of individual Terra X production contracts. This is the result of so-called "round tables" at which, it should be noted, no representation of the German producer community was present. Wikimedia, at any rate, is celebrating its statistics today; the Terra-X clips are generating respectable user numbers on the Wikipedia page.

The German film and television industry and all those creatively involved are now rubbing their eyes in the face of how this rose-tinted deception is catching on, not only among broadcaster executives but also in media policy circles. They have all failed to ask the obvious question: Why does Wikimedia need CC-licensed public service content at all? Wikimedia could also simply enter into a blanket licensing agreement with the relevant collecting societies such as VG Bild-Kunst. Just like schools, universities, and libraries do. And just as Wikimedia itself wants to conclude user agreements with Google, Apple, Amazon or Facebook for facilitated access to content held on Wikipedia. It would be easy to solve all the legal issues. And thanks to the collecting societies that represent the interests of filmmakers, authors and ancillary copyright holders would also have their fair or livelihood-protecting share of the money flows.

Propaganda for "free licenses"

Wikimedia has rejected VG Bild-Kunst's offer to license protected works. As long as its ­campaign in Germany has not completely failed, the organization is apparently continuing to speculate on CC-licensed, high-quality public-domain freeware, for which it does not have to conclude licensing agreements with the collecting societies precisely because it is already CC-licensed. A good deal for Wikimedia and the Internet giants. A disastrous one for the production landscape.

Notwithstanding. Self-publication of content via Creative Commons on subject-specific platforms or in social media makes perfect sense for certain content such as academic publications or even NGO or hobby films. Professional film works, on the other hand, always represent bundles of legally guaranteed legal rights for script, direction, production, camera, music et cetera. Films created under professional market conditions are simply not suitable for simplified publication via Creative Commons licensing.

Wikimedia ignores these facts in its ongoing propaganda about "free licenses" and waves away the criticism with colorful flags that say "common good". In their own interest. At the expense of us filmmakers, at the expense of authors and copyright holders.

The German film and television landscape is facing enormous challenges due to the growing importance of platforms and the resulting dynamics in the audiovisual market. Perhaps as never before. At this time, it is crucial that those with political responsibility as well as the public broadcasters use these challenges in intensive dialog with filmmakers as an opportunity to sustainably strengthen the production landscape in all its diversity. Even better, to allow its creative power to unfold better than before.

What filmmakers need for this are stable legal foundations and fair market standards. The stickers with the vulgar formula "public money = public good" call these foundations into question. They should now finally be scraped off the windshields of media policy in Germany.

David Bernet is a documentary filmmaker and co-chair of AG DOK (Professional Association of Documentary Filmmakers in Germany).

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Free licenses for the common good

by Dr. Christian Humborg, Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland 

Public money - public good! With this formula, Wikimedia Deutschland is campaigning for knowledge content that is financed with tax money or the broadcasting fee to be available to everyone. Some see their business model threatened by this demand. "This is ruining filmmakers," reads an opinion piece published this week by documentary filmmaker and co-chair of AG DOK, David Bernet.

This is a view that ignores the possibility of new financing models, especially for filmmakers and media professionals - and above all the absolute necessity of finally adapting the public broadcasting system in Germany to the realities of the 21st century. Politicians and the broadcasting commissions of the federal states themselves have long recognized that something has to be done. Broadcasting content only via the traditional channels of radio and television no longer does justice to the mission of the public broadcasters. If you want to create good, reliable content for everyone, you have to offer it in the way it is used today: Accessible at any time, shareable, adaptable.

It is alarming that, in this situation, creative people are being ground down in the dispute between content exploiters such as film companies and publishers, platforms, public broadcasters and politicians. But it is incomprehensible that David Bernet points the finger at Wikipedia and Wikimedia, of all places.

The knowledge content financed by taxes and broadcasting fees is manifold, but access and use are anything but self-evident: Why are publicly financed research data behind paywalls of private specialist publishers? Why is the Axel Springer publishing house forced to acquire rights for the broadcast of the historically significant Elefantenrunde on election night? Why don't public broadcasters make these rights available from the outset, especially when it comes to purely in-house productions? Wikimedia is not concerned with entertainment or weekly sporting events. But publicly funded knowledge content should be free. It should be permanently findable, usable and available regardless of location.

Freely licensed - and adequately funded

Creatives - apart from a few superstars - still earn far too little money from their valuable work. Interest groups and employer organizations, above all public broadcasters, urgently need to work on fair remuneration. At the same time, it is also a matter of greater public appreciation of their work. I hardly know any creatives who are only concerned about the money and not also about attention. Provided that they are fairly remunerated, free licenses can address both points. 

If creators receive five euros for their content and another one euro each for two subsequent uses, what would be so bad about it if they received seven euros instead and the work was free for that? Also in terms of predictable financial planning, I would prefer the latter. In fact, creatives are regularly confronted with so-called total buyout clauses as the only contract model, but without free licensing and without reuse options.

Regardless of the financing, the free licensing of content often fails due to the lack of suitable contract templates. Experience shows that those who have to deal with the necessary formalities for every project again - and sometimes against resistance - quickly give up. Public broadcasters therefore urgently need to develop contract templates that enable editorial teams and commissioned creatives to produce content under free licenses in an uncomplicated and legally secure manner.

One thing is clear: Whether creators are adequately compensated for their services by public broadcasters should not depend on licensing. Free licenses bring great advantages for broadcasters and society, such as simpler and longer-lasting usability, simpler rights clearance, and potentially greater visibility. These advantages should also be remunerated accordingly. In any case, creators and editors must be enabled to use free licenses without fear of loss of income.

One reason for the difficult negotiating position of creative professionals is the lack of a strong lobby. For the many creatives, negotiations on an equal footing would only be possible if individuals did not pull out. Just how difficult it is to act collectively in the face of monopolists was demonstrated again in the newspaper market last week, for example, when it became known that Madsack had signed a contract with Google for Showcase. The intention to bundle the negotiating power on the side of the content users in Corint Media did not work out at that point. The role of collecting societies is extremely important and it is to be welcomed that they are no longer allowed to represent only their members in some sectors.

It's also about reach

Wikimedia has always urged rights compliance and at the same time called for the modernization of copyright where it no longer functions reasonably in a digital age. On the other hand, it was the large advertising platforms such as YouTube whose rise and growth would hardly have been conceivable without disregard for legal standards. Precisely because Wikimedia respects copyright, it relies on free licenses that make it possible for everyone to use and edit content permanently and in a legally secure manner.

Furthermore, Wikimedia welcomes all considerations for a non-commercial, European media platform as a basis for the exchange of publicly funded content. Instead, public broadcasters in EU member states mostly limit themselves to short-term collaborations, limited also by national exploitation licenses, while at the same time uploading content to globally available commercial platforms such as Youtube.

The example of Terra X from ZDF shows that there are distribution alternatives, such as the Wikimedia platform Commons. The Terra X clips posted there alone currently achieve more than two million views per month. To put it in perspective, that's two million views more than if they were to appear only in the media libraries of the public broadcasters for a year.

Making Terra X clips available benefits the quality of Wikipedia, no question. But it primarily benefits the viewers - and it's good for Terra X's sustainable reach. Reaching many people is the mission of public broadcasters. Not to mention, Wikipedia articles committed to a neutral point of view are certainly a more suitable environment for public service information content than YouTube and other commercial platforms.

The collaboration between ZDF and Wikipedia on the Terra-X broadcast comes from a volunteer group. This group, "Wiki Loves Broadcast," points out in its response to David Bernet's post that it is solely up to the volunteer community to incorporate content like ZDF's clips into Wikipedia. Neither Wikimedia Deutschland nor the Wikimedia Foundation can influence this.

Knowledge that belongs to everyone

Wikimedia is financially independent. Wikimedia is financed by donations and membership fees from the millions of people who use Wikipedia and other wiki projects. In concrete terms, Wikimedia Deutschland is backed by just under 100,000 association members. In total, more than 500,000 people supported Wikimedia Deutschland financially last year. In 2021, there was actually money from platforms. While the figure in 2020 was 0%, in 2021 it accounted for about 0.2% of revenue. I do not see any threat to independence in this order of magnitude.

Internationally, too, millions of small donations ensure precisely this independence. For the coming year - as in previous years - we expect payments from companies and donations of more than $1,000 to account for less than 20% of the Wikimedia Foundation's total income.

Two things are certain: Wikimedia cannot sell content at all, because Wikimedia does not own any content, unlike any creative person. No profit flows from Wikimedia to individuals, but all income is used solely for the non-profit projects. Personally, I'm glad that among the world's major internet platforms there is at least one that is not concerned with profit.