On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:
"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" daniel@copyleft.no writes:
We should make it as good as possible within as wide a legal framework as possible.
I'm on the side of [efficiency]
"Fair Use" images i) Make articles better ii) Make it harder for future non-educational projects to exploit the "codebase"
IMHO, (i) is an enormous upside, (ii) is a small downside, especially considering that these projects a) don't actually exist yet (and making sacrifices to solve non-existent problems is dumb) b) are already fettered by the many other constraints of the GFDL (i.e. authorship credits, link-backs)
Now, we can be pragmatists, and work toward a really, really good encyclopedia, or we can be dogmatists, and strive toward some abstractly pre-defined definition of "freedom."
I'm sorry you reacted to my earlier posting as a strawman argument. I can understand how it might have been interpreted that way, but I think it's unnecessary to respond "in kind".
First, you phrase ii) in a way that makes it appear the only danger would be that "non-educational" (implying: bad) projects would "exploit" (very bad) Wikipedia. We certainly don't have much sympathy for non-educational exploiters!
Then you go on to imply that calculating with risks is "dumb", and that there is some inherent incompatiblity between "good" and "free" here.
Let's drop the footwork. I'll stick to the chase.
Now - there's a "iii)" here too: In many countries outside the USA, _any_ project, not just non-educational projects, would be dissallowed to use (not "exploit") Wikipedia material.
We're protected from exploitation well enough by the GFDL's copyleft.
"Pragmatism" versus "dogmatism" is in more neutral terms "efficiency" versus "ethics". I don't think Wikipedia really needs that extra few percent of efficiency - we're steamrolling everything there is already.
-- Daniel