On 2/7/07, Kat Walsh kwalsh@wikimedia.org wrote:

... The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to develop educational content under a free content license or in the public domain. For content to be "free content", it must have no significant legal restriction on people's freedom to use, redistribute, or modify the content for any purpose.

One type of licensing that I think the WMF should consider that would meet this criteria while still allowing the creation of totally free content is what I consider a "only in a *Collection License"*.

What I mean by this is that someone should be able to license an image/video/sound bite, etc to be used freely by the wikimedia community and any others utilizing wikimedia community content *AS LONG AS *it is part of a collection and not being redistributed individually (or the works of a single artist are not the only content distributed).

*WHY* This type of licensing meets our goals - to provide free educational content that can be reused and freely distributed. The encyclopedic usage would be fine, subsets of the encylopedia would be fine. Usage in Wikibooks, Wikiquote, etc would be allowed. Someone could make derivative works that are then licensed similarly to the wikimedia foundation. Commercial groups could make products that use the content such as a Book on Cats, or a CD version of Wikipedia, etc.

The only restriction would be those seeking to profit from a specific work (or small group of works) of art. And since selling the individual art IN NO WAY supports the mission of WMF, this restriction does us no harm.

For example, I can imagine someone who sells prints (or a photographer that works for a newspaper) being willing to grant the community a license to use their works to illustrate an appropriate subject while still retaining the right to be the sole provider of the work of art to other newspaper or for t-shirts or other consumer products that are made up of solely (or substantially) the donated work.

Similarly, stock photo sellers might be willing to license some unique photos to the community if they knew that someone couldn't setup a compteting business using their stock photos from commons.

*ANOTHER ADVANTAGE - Can replace Fair Use in some cases* This would also be a way that large organizations which own valuable photos that have historic significance (such as AP or UPI in the US) could grant the community a license to use the work without losing control of the photo. Thus the community would then have permission (a license) to use the work and would no longer have to justify the use of the work under Fair Use for each individual language/jurisdiction. The organizations (and individual artists) who want to support our mission could do so without significantly undermining the value of their art.