On 11/28/05, Mike Finucane mike_finucane@yahoo.com wrote:
The reasons put forward on why images must be allowed to be profited from can be summarized thus:
(1) "Maybe you should explain WHY you have the policy of not allowing people to "get rich" off your work first. There's nothing wrong with commerce. In fact, in today's society commerce is pretty much required for survival."
In answer to that; I can only say that this seems to be the very antithesis of what I thought Wikipedia to be; people providing free material, for a free resource. How does Wikipedia justify its policy on not getting rich quick? I am not proposing a shutdown of western society (although given how the planet is going as a result, dredging sandworms for fuel, clearcutting the amazon for profit, one could go that way); I'm arguing that there should be a space for those who wish to contribute out of the good of their hearts, for a better, freer, society. I thought Wikipedia stood for this; apparently I was wrong, as also evidenced by reason (2):
"I'm arguing that there should be a space for those who wish to contribute out of the good of their hearts, for a better, freer, society." Huh? Of course there is a space. You're free to contribute to Wikipedia out of the good of your heart. But you can't restrict that contribution to only people who aren't making a profit.
I personally believe that we have a better, freer society *with* money than without it. Distribution of information is not free, and by being able to provide the distributors with a potential for profit you allow greater distribution. But what can I say, I'm a huge believer in the principles of capitalism and believe that capitalism is what allows a society to be both free and successful.
Sure, you can try to restrict the cost solely to the distribution, but this is splitting hairs. What about the cost of borrowing the money? What about the cost of the labor in setting up the distributor? If people are earning interest on this borrowed money, and employees are getting paid for their contributions of labor, what does it matter if these people are paid through loans and salaries or stock? Well, I'll tell you one place it matters - stock is often much more efficient tax-wise.
(2) "On the other hand, have you considered getting rich off ours?... I hear that running Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia can be quite lucrative." and "commercial re-use of Wikipedia isn't limited to certain people, you can take part too."
My purchase price, I'm afraid, is a little higher than that.
Yeah, I didn't really understand this point.
Having dismissed the most objectionable objections, we come to more reasonable ones.
(3) "The goal of Wikipedia is "to create and provide a freely licensed and high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in his or her own language....In order to achieve that goal...This necessarily includes... for-profit ... uses"
I realize this has other implications, in terms of funding, but I'll deal with that later. First, I wish to disabuse the notion that "freedom" cant be gained unless and until everyone has made a buck from something freely given. Is love only truly free when someone pays for it? There is a perfectly acceptable, CC-nc designation, which means that everyone - including Bill Gates - can use the material as they wish. They are just prevented, for now, for all time, from buying out Wikipedia and copyrighting it. I'll come back to that.
I hope you do, because it doesn't make much sense.
Bill Gates can use the material as he wishes? What about using it on his corporation's website? How about distributing it with every copy of Windows?
(4) "However, allowing for-profit uses can make the information even more widely available; for example, it encourages people to make derivative works that build on it, or to make and sell hard copies to other people."
This becomes even more reasonable. However, at what price does accessibility come? A quick look around the web shows whats happening; commercial sites like About.com are encouraged to derivatize Wikipedia by loading the page with ads, as suggested by one of our commercially-minded contributers above. Does it REALLY help people to have a copy available on Ebay for $5? How about someone selling links to the site to gullible buyers at $1 a pop? I'm not convinced that any for-profit body has materially benefitted Wikipedia by having been derivatized, or sold as hard copies.
Thousands if not millions of people have first seen Wikipedia content when they clicked on the "definition" link at the top of their Google search, and came to Answers.com. Wikipedia has been distributed to many, many more people because of this. More people are given free access to human knowledge.
(5) "if there are parts that have more restrictive licences (for example, no commercial use), a commercial redistributor would have to go through the entire encyclopedia checking the licence of every single illustration. "
Looking at the wonderful system that is Wikipedia, and all the coding that went into it; it strikes me as strange that no filter can be written, such that a user cannot simply tick a checkbox, yielding a version of Wikipedia for his/her perusal consistent with any of the copyright classifications available. If a user ticks "not nc", for example, he would be able to see/download/pilfer everything which is "not nc" in wikipedia. It doesnt seem insurmountable.
Well, this is true to some extent, though "nc" and "not nc" would be very hard to define. There are lots of different definitions as to what is considered commercial and what isn't.
Which brings us to our last, most reasonable proposition
(6) "And our commercial mirrors bring in new business, make donations and have helped pay wages for Wikipedia employees." "put on DVD, and sold for ten euros(?). A large swathe of this went back to the Foundation"
I have no objection to any use of the images, for non-profit use. That is, if Wikipedia makes money from selling disks to people, I'm fine by that, provided that the money is used to fund wikipedia. I *do* have a problem if someone -say a newspaper - lifts one of my images from Wikipedia, and uses it instead of paying for their own photography, and makes a profit therefrom. Now I'm not the legal expert here that most are, and I suppose "non-profit" use may not cover the generation of money by non-profit organizations. In which case, I dare say, the same people could find a way to write this and include it in the Wiki License. The sole remaining objection to me appears to be that people like me arent ponying up to donate cash to provide whats required to run Wikipedia. And that is, I guess, true. So we need to turn to Satan, and prostitute ourselves, so that some people will have access to free material.
It has nothing to do with Satan or prostitution as far as I can see. And yes, you could say that any non-profit organization can use Wikipedia for profit use. But you'd be surprised what that would mean. The RIAA is a non-profit organization, for instance.
I also just don't see the purpose of the distinction. People are going to "get rich" off your work either way, whether it's the hosting companies and the hard drive companies and the Wikipedia employees or whether it's the people who started up the company and brought the idea to the rest of the world.
And in response to those who ask me to consider the profit enterprises as only american-as-apple-pie patriots, Let me just respond that there are already many for-profit encyclopedias in existence. If Wikipedia becomes just another way for a corporation to make money, it will not improve over the already excellent content provided by these worthy capitalists.
Yes it will, because Wikipedia is and always will be *free*. That is what will always separate Wikipedia from the traditional encyclopedias.
Let's be clear about the danger of consorting with the enemy (because like it or hate it, those who would fence in the commons are always at odds with those who would free resources to all); that Danger is seen in how Bill Gates has bought the rights to the digitial reproduction of huge amounts of Art that is (or should be) public domain. Bill Gates has seen to it that Java has become a little part of Windows.
Wikipedia can't be bought. The copyright is still held by the individual contributors. And actually, by making Wikipedia non-commercial only *that* would enable Wikipedia to be bought. If no one could distribute Wikipedia commercially without permission of the copyright holders, then Bill Gates could buy the rights to be the only person allowed to distribute it commercially.
Private enterprises now own the right to use turmeric as a medicine; and are patenting life forms. Yes, it is unfortunately true that anywhere one CAN make a buck, someone WILL be trying to capture it. "I hear that running Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia can be quite lucrative." What happens when Bill Gates, or Larry Ellison, or someone else builds a new and better gizmo, which makes the Internet obsolete?
We wind up with a new and better Internet! Sounds like a good thing.
Or whatever; just say that the experience of Wikipedia becomes a thousand times better on it, than as it is at present. But the new format is proprietary. Sure the CONTENT is free - but the licensing of the new technology is not. And say that this fictitious company adds new material, such that wikipedia-old becomes obsolete? Who will use the free version anymore?
I really don't understand what you're getting at. If the free version is still available, and no one uses it, then the other version must be so much better that we'd have been incredibly stupid not to allow it to exist.
What if Google generates a superpedia; in which it uses Wikipedia as a base, but adds on vast new access to its own-sourced info?
Then the world is enriched incredibly, and Wikipedia is a tremendous success.
Who will use Wikipedia then?
Probably most of the people who use it now, as well as many additional ones.
Embrace and Extend has killed off more than one open-source before.
I can't think of an example of this. Has Red Hat killed Linux?
I guess you could say that Apple killed FreeBSD, but this wouldn't really be accurate, and the BSD license is much different from the GFDL.
One of the most significant protections against this is the prohibition against for-profit use.
No, the biggest protection against this is copyleft (*). No one is saying you can't copyleft your works you contribute to Wikipedia. Just that you can't restrict commercial use.
(*)Actually, the biggest protection is probably the free market, but that's really a different argument entirely.
I would encourage people to consider other possibilities, other than engaging in or with the for-profiteers. One suggestion would be to sell and widely distribute DVDs, by some of the wikipedia wage-earners, all profits going back to pay for the system. Make it $20 for all I care. I dont even mind policies whereby other non-profits can use the free material.
But embracing embrace and extend, is a dangerous gamble.
postscript. I may contribute some images, I'll have to consider the matter more deeply now. Perhaps some images that no commercial company would want to use; or perhaps a resolution unsuited to commercial useage. I'll continue to contribute information; but the idea that someday some Mogul might squeeze Wikipedia out of existence, and incorporate its assets, just as surely as Netscape was lost to AOL-Time-Warner, will probably have an affect on my desire to help create something new. A world asset which was never saleable to the highest bidder.
Umm, Netscape was a for-profit company. And, in fact, Netscape was *shareware* before AOL came along. That meant that businesses had to pay for the product after using it for 30 days. AOL changed Netscape to freeware, and then eventually open sourced the whole thing. Then they spun it off into its own non-profit organization (Mozilla Foundation).
Anyway, I don't see how "assets" come into play at all here. You still own the copyright on images you submit. Wikipedia can't sell that asset to anyone. In fact, Wikipedia has no control over who follows or doesn't follow the license agreement at all. You still have control over that. You just can't sue someone just because they happen to be making a profit using your work.
Anthony