This was brought up during the 4.0 drafting process, but it was ultimately rejected:

https://creativecommons.org/2012/08/29/ongoing-discussions-noncommercial-and...

We also proposed renaming NC to "Commercial Rights Reserved" to make it clearer what NC does, but that too had insufficient support.

https://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2012-December/008087.html

I'm not sure what the current attitudes are at CC but I think it's no more likely than before.

-Kat

Is there any way we could convince CC to deprecate the useless -NC licenses?

Thanks, Mike

...

On 11 Jul 2020, at 22:59, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

Hi folks,

Pete Forsyth wrote a new essay on the ambiguities of the NonCommercial ("non-commercial use only") provision in Creative Commons licenses, which I wanted to share in case it's helpful for folks making the case against using NC to cultural institutions or others (or in the occasionally resurgent debate to permit NC within Wikimedia):

https://freedomdefined.org/The_non-commercial_provision_obfuscates_intent

It argues that NC is so ambiguous in its defining restriction that it almost defeats the point of attaching a CC license at all. I feel this complements the longer (dated!) essay at https://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC nicely.

Warmly,

Erik

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Hi James :)

(This is my last reply for today, given the recommended posting limit on this list.)

We all agree that NC licenses are exceedingly poor due to the reasons listed, yet we leave a lot of useful content (such as Khan academy videos) less accessible to our readers because we disallow any such use.

I completely agree. I'm wondering if efforts have been made at the WMF or chapter level to partner with these organizations on new initiatives, where a more permissive license could be used? This could perhaps help to introduce CC-BY-SA/CC-BY to orgs like Khan Academy, and help lay the groundwork for potentially changing their default license.

This is a balance between pragmatism and idealism.

I disagree with your framing here. There are many pragmatic reasons to want to build a knowledge commons with uniform expectations for how it can be built upon and re-used. It's also pragmatic to be careful about altering the incentive structure for contributors. Right now, Wikimedia Commons hosts millions of contributions under permissive licenses. How many of those folks would have chosen an "exceedingly poor" (your words) option like NC, if that was available? And if a nonfree carve-out is limited to organizations like Khan Academy, how is such a carve-out fair and equitable to contributors who have, in some cases, given up potential commercial revenue to contribute to Wikimedia projects?

If a license is "exceedingly poor" and harmful to the goals of the free culture movement, incorporating more information under such terms strikes me as neither idealistic nor pragmatic -- it would just be short-sighted.

Warmly, Erik

I always supported a more effective centralized policy for NC. I don't think that will discourage organizations from adopting more free license per se, the same way that adopting certain NC material on local Wikis did not so far. it's not an absolute consequence, it's how you do it.

At least, we should start centralizing that non-free material locally uploaded since it's already there. I would like logos of Universities and coat of arms of public administration and doubtful old images that according to some platforms are free but for Commons are not (gray areas), to be on a NC part of Commons, or a dedicated platform (i always link https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NonFreeWiki and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NonFreeWiki_(2). it's just more rational.

If we did so, we could start from there and see where it goes. We will have a list of established exceptions (that we accept already, just locally), we can add few more ones. it's not a definitive solution, it's a process that we should face together.

I think specifically we should accept NC if it's better than what it is currently available from the uploader. For example if an artist give us a reproduction of its artwork in NC for Wikipedia, is it still better than nothing? Are we really sure he would have done something in any case if we did not provide such options? We probbaly all suspect it's the max we can can get to the world in that scenario. This approach for example will not apply to the case of WHO, in their case is not a clear improvement, so no upload.

If you put a limited group of users in charge of that process, or some funnel step in the procedure, it will never be massive, but it might be targeted and useful, IMHO. Alex

Il domenica 12 luglio 2020, 02:33:04 CEST, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com ha scritto:

Yes one of the stronger reasons to reject all use of the NC license is that it increases incentives for other organizations to actually adopt open licenses. I simply wish that such a position would convince more organizations. WHO has repeatedly told me that we, as a non-profit, are already free to use their work and if we chose not to, that is on us.

James

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 6:19 PM Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

Hi James :)

(This is my last reply for today, given the recommended posting limit on this list.)

...

We all agree that NC licenses are exceedingly poor due to the reasons listed, yet we leave a lot of useful content (such as Khan academy

videos)

...

less accessible to our readers because we disallow any such use.

I completely agree. I'm wondering if efforts have been made at the WMF or chapter level to partner with these organizations on new initiatives, where a more permissive license could be used? This could perhaps help to introduce CC-BY-SA/CC-BY to orgs like Khan Academy, and help lay the groundwork for potentially changing their default license.

...

This is a balance between pragmatism and idealism.

I disagree with your framing here. There are many pragmatic reasons to want to build a knowledge commons with uniform expectations for how it can be built upon and re-used. It's also pragmatic to be careful about altering the incentive structure for contributors. Right now, Wikimedia Commons hosts millions of contributions under permissive licenses. How many of those folks would have chosen an "exceedingly poor" (your words) option like NC, if that was available? And if a nonfree carve-out is limited to organizations like Khan Academy, how is such a carve-out fair and equitable to contributors who have, in some cases, given up potential commercial revenue to contribute to Wikimedia projects?

If a license is "exceedingly poor" and harmful to the goals of the free culture movement, incorporating more information under such terms strikes me as neither idealistic nor pragmatic -- it would just be short-sighted.

Warmly, Erik

---

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Hello, Thank you for the link, Erik, I am going to read Pete Forsyth‘s text carefully. My thinking about the module was influenced by some WMD publications, by Till Kreutzer and also this one: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Free_Knowledge_thanks_to_Creative_Commo... So I learned about the problems of the module. In general I find it most unfortunate when a reuser has to evaluate a larger work for its elements and its different licenses - often you do not only reuse one monolithic piece but something consisting of smaller elements, or a larger group of elements (e.g. dozens of pictures about a topic). The more I was surprised when in the Strategy 2030 discussions and then recommendations the modules ND and NC were called necessary for the needs of the Global South. Though I am not a absolute or ideological opponent of any module, I wondered about the reasons and I never got an answer. In the meanwhile, the modules disappeared from the recommendations, and that is just good so. So the problem of the NC module remains that many who apply it are not always conscious about undesired consequences, while some who apply it use the module very consciously for a specific reason - e.g. in a hybrid model, to distribute content but not to share it, to reserve commercial use exclusively for oneself. I do not want to judge about this intention, but I imagine that it can become problematic when your goal is to build a knowledge *commons*. Kind regards Ziko

Benjamin Lees emufarmers@gmail.com schrieb am So. 12. Juli 2020 um 09:31:

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 9:20 PM Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Are we really sure he would have done something in any case if we did not provide such options?

It's pretty hard to be sure about the hypothetical behavior of individuals. Undoubtedly, as you say, there are some people who are *only* willing to submit material to us if it is NC, and thus we currently lose out on material from them. Undoubtedly, as Erik says, there are also some people who submit material to us under a free license but would choose an NC license if it were available, and thus we currently gain the benefit of their work being freely licensed, rather than NC. I suspect the latter pool is far larger than the former.

When the choice is truly between a particular non-free image and not having any image, fair use (for projects with fair use policies) already allows us to use that image. In other cases, it may be that no free image is available right now, but someone can go out and take one. There would be much less incentive to do so if we were already using an NC image, so such stopgaps would likely become permanent.

Of course, there will be attractive edge cases where we can fairly confidently say "the choice is NC or nothing". But we cannot be ruled by edge cases; we must weigh them against the costs of complexity, confusion, and unfairness that we would be creating for ourselves (to say nothing of the additional headache we would create for reusers).

Emufarmers _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

People are not conscious of NC module also because we don't take a clear approach about it. Centralizing the storage of NC files is probably one of the clear step to make the community and third parties more conscious.

One of the causes of the current confusion is precisely because we treat them is as something marginal while they are already structural in our ecosystem. Alessandro Il domenica 12 luglio 2020, 10:52:04 CEST, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com ha scritto:

Hello, Thank you for the link, Erik, I am going to read Pete Forsyth‘s text carefully. My thinking about the module was influenced by some WMD publications, by Till Kreutzer and also this one: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Free_Knowledge_thanks_to_Creative_Commo... So I learned about the problems of the module. In general I find it most unfortunate when a reuser has to evaluate a larger work for its elements and its different licenses - often you do not only reuse one monolithic piece but something consisting of smaller elements, or a larger group of elements (e.g. dozens of pictures about a topic). The more I was surprised when in the Strategy 2030 discussions and then recommendations the modules ND and NC were called necessary for the needs of the Global South. Though I am not a absolute or ideological opponent of any module, I wondered about the reasons and I never got an answer. In the meanwhile, the modules disappeared from the recommendations, and that is just good so. So the problem of the NC module remains that many who apply it are not always conscious about undesired consequences,  while some who apply it use the module very consciously for a specific reason - e.g. in a hybrid model, to distribute content but not to share it, to reserve commercial use exclusively for oneself. I do not want to judge about this intention, but I imagine that it can become problematic when your goal is to build a knowledge *commons*. Kind regards Ziko

Benjamin Lees emufarmers@gmail.com schrieb am So. 12. Juli 2020 um 09:31:

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 9:20 PM Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Are we really sure he would have done something in any case if we did not provide such options?

It's pretty hard to be sure about the hypothetical behavior of individuals.  Undoubtedly, as you say, there are some people who are *only* willing to submit material to us if it is NC, and thus we currently lose out on material from them.  Undoubtedly, as Erik says, there are also some people who submit material to us under a free license but would choose an NC license if it were available, and thus we currently gain the benefit of their work being freely licensed, rather than NC.  I suspect the latter pool is far larger than the former.

When the choice is truly between a particular non-free image and not having any image, fair use (for projects with fair use policies) already allows us to use that image.  In other cases, it may be that no free image is available right now, but someone can go out and take one.  There would be much less incentive to do so if we were already using an NC image, so such stopgaps would likely become permanent.

Of course, there will be attractive edge cases where we can fairly confidently say "the choice is NC or nothing".  But we cannot be ruled by edge cases; we must weigh them against the costs of complexity, confusion, and unfairness that we would be creating for ourselves (to say nothing of the additional headache we would create for reusers).

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The question is however as well: how many open licensed content creators would switch to NC if they were aware that this would be 'good enough' for Wikipedia - even if that means in reality only English Wikipedia (but who cares about other languages) and without actually allowing to build on top of it?

I have found the argument 'don't use NC because then it can't be used on Wikipedia' rather convincing in the past. It will not always work, and I also wish it would convince /more/ organizations. But then, I would also wish that enwiki wouldn't use fair use exceptions - so maybe I'm not the benchmark you'd be looking at anyway.

Lodewijk

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 5:32 PM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:

Yes one of the stronger reasons to reject all use of the NC license is that it increases incentives for other organizations to actually adopt open licenses. I simply wish that such a position would convince more organizations. WHO has repeatedly told me that we, as a non-profit, are already free to use their work and if we chose not to, that is on us.

James

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 6:19 PM Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi James :)

(This is my last reply for today, given the recommended posting limit on this list.)

...

We all agree that NC licenses are exceedingly poor due to the reasons listed, yet we leave a lot of useful content (such as Khan academy

videos)

...

less accessible to our readers because we disallow any such use.

I completely agree. I'm wondering if efforts have been made at the WMF or chapter level to partner with these organizations on new initiatives, where a more permissive license could be used? This could perhaps help to introduce CC-BY-SA/CC-BY to orgs like Khan Academy, and help lay the groundwork for potentially changing their default license.

...

This is a balance between pragmatism and idealism.

I disagree with your framing here. There are many pragmatic reasons to want to build a knowledge commons with uniform expectations for how it can be built upon and re-used. It's also pragmatic to be careful about altering the incentive structure for contributors. Right now, Wikimedia Commons hosts millions of contributions under permissive licenses. How many of those folks would have chosen an "exceedingly poor" (your words) option like NC, if that was available? And if a nonfree carve-out is limited to organizations like Khan Academy, how is such a carve-out fair and equitable to contributors who have, in some cases, given up potential commercial revenue to contribute to Wikimedia projects?

If a license is "exceedingly poor" and harmful to the goals of the free culture movement, incorporating more information under such terms strikes me as neither idealistic nor pragmatic -- it would just be short-sighted.

Warmly, Erik

---

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I would probably never try to convince somebody about NC license. It sounds pushy and almost never works, it's like optimizing a process that has a 0.1% output. of course I can spend less time to do so, and maybe double the effect, but it's still a limited output.

I prefer to agree with them, build a trust, produce other content with such trust (that is not related to files of their production) and than, maybe, we face the issue of images. For example I almost convinced an artist to give me in free license reproductions of his public artworks that are already destroyed, until a person close to him stopped him (and he agreed with me prgamatically, I think that he stopped only for sentimental reason) There are other way to get free files ad they have nothing to do about "being used on Wikipedia". if you want to be used on Wikipedia, you put it there, in my experience this is not a critical factor in changing the opinion. For example Wiki Science Competition gets files also from scientists that would normally use NC, but it's not really about explaining the license, it's about getting a prize, a visibility and being part of a network, a strat a discussion about outreach.

Alessandro

Il lunedì 13 luglio 2020, 08:25:39 CEST, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com ha scritto:

Erik, thanks for posting the essay here. Glad to see the interest in this topic.

I wrote this because I have found that when somebody asks me about the NC provision, I often want to point them to a simple webpage (rather than "reinventing the wheel" every time it comes up). There are some pages out there (I listed some in the "See also" section), but I have yet to find somewhere this particular point -- the need of a general license to issue clear guidance -- articulated anywhere in a concise, accessible way.

I'm surprised (and a little disappointed) to see that the possibility of Wikimedia generally accepting NC-licensed work is being discussed. But apart from that discussion, I think many of you in this discussion have, at one time or another, wanted to help guide someone toward using a more permissive license, rather than a NC license.

For those who have, do you have favorite webpages you find helpful to share? Does this one seem like a useful addition? I'd appreciate any feedback or constructive edits to this essay; I also think it would be useful to have some of the other arguments, currently collected in longer documents, expressed in more "bite-sized" pieces like this, which could be linked together. Do others agree, and if so, are you inclined to help draft some complementary pages?

-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 3:23 PM effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:

The question is however as well: how many open licensed content creators would switch to NC if they were aware that this would be 'good enough' for Wikipedia - even if that means in reality only English Wikipedia (but who cares about other languages) and without actually allowing to build on top of it?

I have found the argument 'don't use NC because then it can't be used on Wikipedia' rather convincing in the past. It will not always work, and I also wish it would convince /more/ organizations. But then, I would also wish that enwiki wouldn't use fair use exceptions - so maybe I'm not the benchmark you'd be looking at anyway.

Lodewijk

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 5:32 PM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:

...

Yes one of the stronger reasons to reject all use of the NC license is

that

...

it increases incentives for other organizations to actually adopt open licenses. I simply wish that such a position would convince more organizations. WHO has repeatedly told me that we, as a non-profit, are already free to use their work and if we chose not to, that is on us.

James

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 6:19 PM Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com

wrote:

...

...

Hi James :)

(This is my last reply for today, given the recommended posting limit on this list.)

...

We all agree that NC licenses are exceedingly poor due to the reasons listed, yet we leave a lot of useful content (such as Khan academy

videos)

...

less accessible to our readers because we disallow any such use.

I completely agree. I'm wondering if efforts have been made at the WMF or chapter level to partner with these organizations on new initiatives, where a more permissive license could be used? This could perhaps help to introduce CC-BY-SA/CC-BY to orgs like Khan Academy, and help lay the groundwork for potentially changing their default license.

...

This is a balance between pragmatism and idealism.

I disagree with your framing here. There are many pragmatic reasons to want to build a knowledge commons with uniform expectations for how it can be built upon and re-used. It's also pragmatic to be careful about altering the incentive structure for contributors. Right now, Wikimedia Commons hosts millions of contributions under permissive licenses. How many of those folks would have chosen an "exceedingly poor" (your words) option like NC, if that was available? And if a nonfree carve-out is limited to organizations like Khan Academy, how is such a carve-out fair and equitable to contributors who have, in some cases, given up potential commercial revenue to contribute to Wikimedia projects?

If a license is "exceedingly poor" and harmful to the goals of the free culture movement, incorporating more information under such terms strikes me as neither idealistic nor pragmatic -- it would just be short-sighted.

Warmly, Erik

---

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Most of the proposal for NC usually pushed for a separate infrastructure, as far as I know. I'm not a fan of a unified archive, for example I am fine with a separate one.

As I said, I also see it as a great way to experiment many features we can't have on Commons, maybe even a truly multimedia archive with both files and texts in a distant future, but I digress here.

Since there are hints in this discussion, I also hoped such infrastructure to act as a "preparation" environment of legal transition of copyright works into the public domain, where it is possible to prepare files with metadata and so on, so they can be moved on January, 1st with a click. it's a good compromise, you can keep maybe non-fully free files on Wikipedia for strict educational purpose as long as you provide a high quality description on such archive. it catalyzes content and quality.

For example, I handle a dozen of potentially ambiguous files every month, i would love to have a platform designed to host those, where I can put all the useful information I have discovered in any case (date, author, etc) without losing them because I cannot be sure 100% the files are free or some user will not ask me later to prove they are as ancient as they claim to be. With a good Wikidata-centric structure, it can really work.

If we really want to go in that direction, we can handle it with clear rules for the upload, the access or the download.

This reminds me of a similar discussion about hidden copyright violations. if 100s sysops can still see them, why not 500s patrollers or 5000s certified long-term autopatrolled users? Where is the difference? They are still not public in any case, I simply have to ask a sysop to tell what's there, using minutes I could use to create content. If you are fine with this access by some users, or with the limited views of versions to be validated on some wikis, you can understand a restricted access in general, you just need to establish its role. It simply needs a functional role to be declared in the infrastructure, and we have some ideas. We can debate later how much such files can be seen by the general public or by only registered users. For example you can declare that the logos of a company can be seen by all Wikipedias in ns0 (but non Wikisource or Wikiquote or Wikivoyage, for example), or that the access is totally restricted for the general public, or that the link it's in the articles like what you can find for Commons categories but the download is limited, o the resolution is.

Also,if you just put a limit of files per person or a threshold of cross-wiki edit to or a special flag for the upload, it can grow naturally for many years without exploding, more in agreement with a functional growth of the content that we are hosting. Alessandro

Il lunedì 3 agosto 2020, 00:53:11 CEST, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com ha scritto:

I don't think we should mix NC with free-knowledge licenses . I do absolutely think we should maintain an archive, visible to the public with at most a simple hoop to jump through, of material that is offered to us in any legal way but not yet free. This would include: material currently under a CC or other non-fd license, material that can be reasonably assumed to belong to the uploader but has not yet been so demonstrated and (c) cleared by our various processes, free material whose use and classification is otherwise under debate.

Primary uses of such an archive: ~ Capturing the first step of any freely-licensed sharing: having a persistent copy of the work, with initial license + uploader information, and a nominal contact to pursue ~ Centralizing subsequent public discussions about how to make interesting materials free : by relicensing, recreation, or other method ~ Preserving work done to annotate/classify works where license turns out to be ambiguous ~ Simplifying other deletion and license discussions that are inefficient and confusing now

If there are motivational reasons to make the result of such archiving "not as visible online" or "not as convenient as Commons", that's easily done without restricting public access or {item name resolution}.

S

🌍🌏🌎🌑

On Mon., Jul. 13, 2020, 2:24 a.m. Pete Forsyth, peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:

Erik, thanks for posting the essay here. Glad to see the interest in this topic.

I wrote this because I have found that when somebody asks me about the NC provision, I often want to point them to a simple webpage (rather than "reinventing the wheel" every time it comes up). There are some pages out there (I listed some in the "See also" section), but I have yet to find somewhere this particular point -- the need of a general license to issue clear guidance -- articulated anywhere in a concise, accessible way.

I'm surprised (and a little disappointed) to see that the possibility of Wikimedia generally accepting NC-licensed work is being discussed. But apart from that discussion, I think many of you in this discussion have, at one time or another, wanted to help guide someone toward using a more permissive license, rather than a NC license.

For those who have, do you have favorite webpages you find helpful to share? Does this one seem like a useful addition? I'd appreciate any feedback or constructive edits to this essay; I also think it would be useful to have some of the other arguments, currently collected in longer documents, expressed in more "bite-sized" pieces like this, which could be linked together. Do others agree, and if so, are you inclined to help draft some complementary pages?

-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 3:23 PM effe iets anders <effeietsanders@gmail.com

...

wrote:

...

The question is however as well: how many open licensed content creators would switch to NC if they were aware that this would be 'good enough'

for

...

Wikipedia - even if that means in reality only English Wikipedia (but who cares about other languages) and without actually allowing to build on

top

...

of it?

I have found the argument 'don't use NC because then it can't be used on Wikipedia' rather convincing in the past. It will not always work, and I also wish it would convince /more/ organizations. But then, I would also wish that enwiki wouldn't use fair use exceptions - so maybe I'm not the benchmark you'd be looking at anyway.

Lodewijk

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 5:32 PM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:

...

Yes one of the stronger reasons to reject all use of the NC license is

that

...

it increases incentives for other organizations to actually adopt open licenses. I simply wish that such a position would convince more organizations. WHO has repeatedly told me that we, as a non-profit, are already free to use their work and if we chose not to, that is on us.

James

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 6:19 PM Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com

wrote:

...

...

Hi James :)

(This is my last reply for today, given the recommended posting limit on this list.)

...

We all agree that NC licenses are exceedingly poor due to the

reasons

...

...

...

...

listed, yet we leave a lot of useful content (such as Khan academy

videos)

...

less accessible to our readers because we disallow any such use.

I completely agree. I'm wondering if efforts have been made at the

WMF

...

...

...

or chapter level to partner with these organizations on new initiatives, where a more permissive license could be used? This

could

...

...

...

perhaps help to introduce CC-BY-SA/CC-BY to orgs like Khan Academy, and help lay the groundwork for potentially changing their default license.

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This is a balance between pragmatism and idealism.

I disagree with your framing here. There are many pragmatic reasons

to

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want to build a knowledge commons with uniform expectations for how

it

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can be built upon and re-used. It's also pragmatic to be careful

about

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altering the incentive structure for contributors. Right now, Wikimedia Commons hosts millions of contributions under permissive licenses. How many of those folks would have chosen an "exceedingly poor" (your words) option like NC, if that was available? And if a nonfree carve-out is limited to organizations like Khan Academy, how is such a carve-out fair and equitable to contributors who have, in some cases, given up potential commercial revenue to contribute to Wikimedia projects?

If a license is "exceedingly poor" and harmful to the goals of the free culture movement, incorporating more information under such

terms

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strikes me as neither idealistic nor pragmatic -- it would just be short-sighted.

Warmly, Erik

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We have an archive mixing different licenses now, one is Commons ranging from CC-0 to CC BY SA, and other ones are local Wikis sometimes including in their spectrum of situations many non-free files in fair use. this is proof that an archive hosting non-free files with other free-licensed information has nothing special per se. A new archive might simply be more clear and linear than those, since it would be designed specifically to handle the matter.

I work in outreach the whole time, you can give me all the money you want to improve my productivity, but I would still use it more efficiently if I could have a more integrated infrastructure specifically for this issue. A.

Il venerdì 7 agosto 2020, 08:52:31 CEST, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com ha scritto:

On Sun, Aug 2, 2020 at 3:52 PM Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:

I don't think we should mix NC with free-knowledge licenses . I do absolutely think we should maintain an archive, visible to the public with at most a simple hoop to jump through, of material that is offered to us in any legal way but not yet free.

Such an archive would _unavoidably_ "mix NC with free-knowledge licenses" -- because all collaborative and transformative work happening in the archive itself would be released under free knowledge licenses. Worse, any meaningful transformations of the archived works would result in derivative works that remain nonfree, directly enlisting volunteers in the creation of nonfree knowledge.

In any event, why create an archive for works under borderline terms, while ignoring more restricted works that could be plausibly released under a free license tomorrow? Works that are nonfree for simple economic reasons (e.g., some old but useful textbook) may often be easier to "set free" than those which are nonfree for reasons of longstanding policy (e.g, the WHO example). Why amass the latter and ignore the former? I don't see how this would strengthen Wikimedia's free knowledge commitment, but I can easily see how it could weaken it considerably and very quickly, whether or not that's the intent.

To be clear, I think creating free summaries and descriptions of nonfree works (from traditional textbooks and scientific papers to Khan Academy videos) is very much in line with the Wikimedia mission. I don't think it requires hosting the works. To the extent that there is concern about losing access to works that are currently available via public URLs, the use of Internet Archive enabled citation URLs provides a great example for how to avoid such link rot.

I'm sure there are also plenty of tech and non-tech ways Wikimedia could support volunteers and chapters that work on outreach to set more educational works free, none of which require the creation of a nonfree archive.

Warmly, Erik

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On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 2:51 PM Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:

There should be no 'collaborative and transformative work' done on this archive

Bulk uploads often entail collaboration or transformation as the uploads are organized, and as format issues and other considerations are worked through. If you want to enable uploads in a wiki context, I don't think you'll be able to (or want to!) get around that. :) That's part of the reason why I think the upload stage should be reserved for the point when licensing issues have in fact been resolved.

Erik, to your point — yes, this should also include old books that are in the process of relicensing, if those books have been uploaded to us by or on behalf of a license holder, and we are confirming that and working through related steps.

Is your assumption that the set of works that would be so archived is closer to being usable in Wikimedia projects (i.e. freely licensed) than any other set of works? If so, I still don't see how this is true. The decision to apply a license like NC is often a very intentional one, difficult to reverse, as the many discussions about this license have shown. In contrast, the decision to just use conventional copyright is often not a decision at all. In many cases, a copyrighted work may be "free for the asking".

It helps our work to have a persistent public place (not randomly deleted from time to time!) to discuss determining their license status, getting formal and informal license clearance, discussions with the contributors to refine their understanding of options, debates among ourselves about whether a license grant was sufficient and how to obtain more clarity, &c.

I agree with that! I think it could be done e.g. in a WikiBase instance which focuses on tracking URLs of valuable educational content rather than files. This would have some advantages:

- it is inclusive of material under all licensing terms, in any repository - it is inclusive of material that is not trivially downloadable or that is in formats that require conversion or transformation - it can hold URLs to collections alongside URLs to single files

It could be scoped to track material that is associated with plausible efforts to liberate it for use in Wikimedia, e.g., organized under WikiProjects.

And what of archiving? As I said before, a partner like the Internet Archive would IMO be well-suited to help archive URLs that permit it, without requiring the manual labor of managing copies in some kind of pseudo-wiki.

Fundamentally I just don't buy the apparent premise that amassing NC type content, or content under your "any legal way but not yet free" formulation, actually helps in the goal of content liberation. Is that stuff worth archiving? Sure, but Wikimedia is not the IA.

I do appreciate the discussion, and the WikiNotYetFree proposal (even if I disagree with its premise for the same reasons). If there's interest in the idea formulated above, of a wiki that truly is a clearinghouse and not an archive of nonfree content, I would be happy to try to help articulate it further.

Warmly, Erik

Centralized Wiki for NC files will work. It's the same debate when we started to put metadata on Commons, it did not stop the process, it just made it slower and less efficient, but it remained kinda inevitable. It's the same background, the frustration and confusion of the current situation is projected to the future one, it's mostly a "passive" resistance with a little bit of patronizing attitude toward other communities. It happens also because the more some users assume this future scenario is inevitable, the easier it is for them to consider the present situation as inevitable as well and skip any responsibility, it's a little bit an identity element.

Local users are not confused or irritated in general because they are moody, it's mostly because the Commons community is moody. Local communities are not three or four isolated users, they are structured, with a spectrum of established competences. The mass of users involved will come from that pool. I am pretty sure that if you build a repository without all the users who encouraged most of the dysfunctional attitude we have now on Commons, it's going to be better, if not fine. For some of us in the end the local user repeating a wrong concept to get a file kept is very similar to the Commons user doing the same to make it deleted, the same stubborn attitude with limited overall perspective that few people really wanted in the first place. These two profiles find a balance but it's not the best balance for the general workflow, it's a "social thing". Whatever disrupt the situation, give us some chance to improve that.

Of course many users will show there to oppose. And if approved, for the first two or three years at every single minor misstep of the process they will jump there foretelling disasters: They usually find the time to oppose to this sort of requests, more than doing a lot of other tasks probably, and the concepts are usually the same. That's why its getting more and more difficult to give to it a big weigh. In any case, some way to centralize existing NC will be found. For example, think about Wikidata item for logos and connect them to local files. It will be more tortuous, in a way it's not noticed immediately, probably. Until we get there somehow, personally I skip many activities regarding NC including their conversion, and focus on something else. I am probably not the only one adopting more or less this attitude.

Good outreach for me is not about a single aspect, is a method, and will always include a spectrum of results. The statement "no Wikipedia if you don't remove NC" is not really so effective, it sounds cheap especially after many years Wiki exists and people know what they want. For the high-quality material we miss, I think it's more about proposing a good project, a structured project and in that framework I can suggest to update some NC. I have refused to trick people to give files with no NC, I clearly tell them to understand the license. There are many files which were not uploaded initially, but those users ended up giving more new files later. If I could be a user with a flag for NC upload, I will put a very limited amount of files per year, but the process behind such files will be very valuable.

A.

Il martedì 14 luglio 2020, 09:41:05 CEST, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com ha scritto:

James wrote:

I simply wish that such a position would convince more organizations. WHO has repeatedly told me that we, as a non-profit, are already free to use their work and if we chose not to, that is on us.

I agree of course that this sort of institutional inertia can be incredibly frustrating, especially in cases like WHO -- a publicly funded international institution which should be putting its work in the public domain. For all its own institutional failings (and there are many, past and present), the US was at least able to get that much right in its copyright laws more than 100 years ago. I don't believe we should let publicly funded institutions that use restrictive licensing terms off the hook, and there's a degree to which positive persuasion needs to be coupled with public pressure here.

Like Pete, I'm curious about resources & practices folks have found useful in persuading individuals or institutions to release materials under free licenses. I'll reiterate that my sense is that _new_ partnerships that focus on material yet to be created may be a good way to get a foot in the door, so to speak.

Alessandro wrote:

At least, we should start centralizing that non-free material locally uploaded since it's already there. I would like logos of Universities and coat of arms of public administration and doubtful old images that according to some platforms are free but for Commons are not (gray areas), to be on a NC part of Commons, or a dedicated platform (i always link https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NonFreeWiki and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NonFreeWiki_(2).

I agree that a nonfree wiki that does not alter existing policies (i.e. is not intended to open the door to NC) is a reasonable thing to consider for practical reasons; however, I personally oppose these proposals on practical grounds. While the opposition to the main proposal is currently a minority, I suspect the ratio would change rather quickly if the proposals were more widely announced.

I see two primary scenarios for how a nonfree wiki could play out:

- scenario A: a nonfree wiki is successful at policing uploads and usage consistent with the policies across wikis. Uploaders from those communities are frequently frustrated and confused by deletions, discussion, and policies of the nonfree wiki, just as they are frustrated by deletions, discussions, and policies on Wikimedia Commons today. With one more wiki in the mix, the process of uploading files is increasingly seen to be akin to a Klingon Pain Stick Ritual.

- scenario B: a nonfree wiki is unsuccessful at policing uploads, and becomes a DMCA magnet or worse. Communities are frustrated because their own rules for limiting nonfree uploads are frequently violated through the transclusion of files from the nonfree repository.

In fact, a combination of those two scenarios -- where there's deep frustration about both enforcement and lack thereof -- seems most likely to me.

It's worth asking whether there are good ways to improve the handling and patrolling of nonfree files. I suspect there are many, but I'm pretty sure the creation of a separate repository for this stuff is an idea that doesn't withstand scrutiny. Exemptions must be considered in a project-local context, both in terms of policy and concrete use, by a community in its own language, and any improvements to efficiency must start from this central premise.

Warmly, Erik

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