As a member of the board of Wikimedia France, I had a meeting with the head and the legal counsel of some society of authors, whose name I shall leave unstated (the problems are not specific to them). Their legal counsel told me that their stance is that all legal conditions stating that the author cedes all rights for an unbounded duration are abusive and that they were ready to fight that in court if necessary. These people have a very different point of view from ours. Publishers try to have them sign agreements in which they sell their works for a fixed pity sum for any use whatsoever. We may consider "free of rights" content to be a Good Thing (TM), but to them this is a Bad Thing (TM). To them, "free of rights content" ("libre de droits" in French) means, for instance, cheap CDs and DVDs in which you have 1000s of photos and other pictures that you can use without paying royalties, that is, in practice, this means loss of income to them. By "loss of income", I don't mean "loss of a little income in an ocean of $$$", but I mean making it difficult to make ends meet at the end of the month. For almost everybody on this list (I'm leaving out Brad and Danny, sorry folks), Wikipedia is a hobby project that we contribute to in our free time. This is not the case of these people. Their works are their livelihood. They're in a bad position, they feel shafted by the economic powers, so they naturally have a tendency to be wary of evolutions that may make their situation worse. That's human. When I discussed "free of rights" stuff with them, I felt like somebody trying to promote Sauron of Mordor to hobbits. Not a comfortable position, believe me. This is something I'd like to stress : in most of our dealings as representatives of Wikimedia France, we haven't encountered people who acted against our wishes out of spite, but rather people who have to deal with pressures (from their hierarchy, from economic powers, from the legal system, etc.) and respond in a fairly understandable way. As Delphine explained, going into a head to head confrontation is counter-productive; one must at least try to understand why they act in this way, and they often have a fairly good rationale from their point of view. (I'm not saying we should accomodate each and every request from people we disagree with, but at least we should try to consider that they're often acting sensibly from their point of view.) Trying to push radical ideas in an "all or nothing" approach tends to lead to a lose-lose situation. In order to get something out of people, they have to listen to what you say (yay! I feel like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_de_la_Palice ). If you start becoming confrontational, they start getting confrontational too, and they stop listening. Besides, I feel very uncomfortable promoting what we do as "sensible". We have ultra-stringent requirements about "free" content, yet we allow GFDL content (which all the quirks of the GFDL, which makes it unusable for many applications), and then we explain that we allow "fair use" content, a very vaguely defined legal exception. As we say in France, before pointing out the straw in someone else's eye, beware of not having an entire woodblock in one's own. Our licensing policy is inconsistent too, and people will not take it kindly if we ask that they alter theirs whereas we are incapable of sorting out ours. An important point is that for the last 150 years, French copyright law has been (at least in theory, practice is different, see below) centered around the idea of an *author* making a *work of the mind* which is his *property*. The author then authorizes *each use* of the work. (In practice, authors cede rights to publishers, but the contracts are then supposed to delineate the limits of these cessions of rights. They also cede their rights to societies who collect rights on their behalf.) Law delineates what can and cannot be done in publishing contracts (CPI L132-1 to L132-17). It prohibits indiscriminate ceding of rights (CPI L131-1, L131-3). Law imposes that the author should be remunerated in proportion to the use of his work (CPI L131-4), with some exceptions. In comparison to that, support for the possibility of free licenses seems to hinge on CPI L122-7-1. I don't have the case law out of my head; certainly, getting a comprehensive file on French case law with respect to the protection of authors would probably involve paying a lawyer to research it. But, indeed, there *are* protections against ceding all rights for any use, that's a fact, and courts *have* ruled that some clauses in publishing contracts were abusive. (Fundamentally, this is because these contracts are unbalanced : on the one hand you have a self-employed author, cartoonist, photographer etc. who has to pay the bills at the end of the month, on the other hand a big corporation.) Our beloved "free licenses" are largely untested in court, and I suspect that how they interact with existing legislation could fill entire doctoral theses in law... Another important issue is that this whole debate is not France-centered. "Copyright" as practiced in the US is largely an American conception (though British law may be somewhat similar to some extent, even though apparently the British recognize scanning images as creating rights?). The Berne convention, which many countries (including, somewhat recently, the US) have signed is based on 19th century French ideas of the rights of authors (I reckon Victor Hugo pushed for it. Yes, the guy who originally wrote the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. :-) ) [ When I say CPI, I mean the French intellectual property code, available on http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr . This is a very entertaining reading. Plus, after a while, one is capable of peppering one's conversation with "see CPI L122-5 third paragraph", a sure win in academic cocktail parties.]