Doc James raised the issue of pragmatism v idealism and that essay is indeed rather focussed on the idealistic arguments against NC.

EmuFarmers has touched on the pragmatic side of the debate, and I think it worth reminding ourselves about that dimension as well. So here are some pragmatic arguments against us hosting NC content:

1 For some users NC content and the ambiguity about it is a commercial opportunity. There is minimal cost to distributing emails threatening takedown notices and other legal sanction, and for many small resusers the cost of checking their case with a lawyer is less than the cost of paying to use what they thought was free to use and maybe writing a letter of complaint to the media library that let them down. Few of our volunteers are going to be keen to volunteer to handle such complaints, whether or not the use was clearly NC, clearly commercial or down right ambiguous.

2 We have been hosting openly licensed material for nearly two decades and we now have a lot of it. If we now change to allowing NC on Commons, some of our contributors, institutional or individual, will want to shift their material from an open licence to NC. Whether or not we allow this, the disruption and complications are not something that the Commons volunteer community is geared up to handle.

3 Ideally when we choose an image to illustrate a Wikipedia article we are choosing the best image available to us on Commons. OK there are people whose ego gets in the way and prefer to use the images they have taken, and occasionally there are other arguments, but it is rare for anyone to have a commercial incentive to choose one image over another. Once you allow NC imagery you make Wikipedia a shop window for content from image libraries and others who are prepared to forego the genuinely non commercial uses, and the uses in parts of the world where copyright is hard to enforce, in return for revenue from the unwary in parts of the world where they can charge for any use they can argue is "commercial". Wikipedia has enough on its hands combatting spammers and reputation managers who want our content to promote their business, Opening up a whole new front in that conflict, against a group of editors "upgrading" images to ones they strongly assert are "better quality" without necessarily disclosing their conflict of interest re those images is not something that the Wikipedia volunteer community is geared up to handle.

Those are three pragmatic reasons why it would be a mistake for us to allow NC images on Commons and the English Wikipedia. This is one of those areas where pragmatism and idealism both push us in the same direction.

Regards

WereSpielChequers

Message: 3 Date: Sat, 11 Jul 2020 18:31:54 -0600 From: James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] New essay on the ambiguity of NC licenses Message-ID: <CAF1en7UHgi= Zv8XsA4KFknGpBWrTyMaPCMPkcg1B69m0XdPTig@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

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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