On 28/11/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
But there's other options. In Germany, for example, there was a very successful DVD distribution of the German-language wikipedia; it was reformatted, put on DVD, and sold for ten euros(?). A large swathe of this went back to the Foundation, a small quantity went to production costs, and the residue went to the company that produced and distributed them. Given the remarkable sales, I assume they made a profit - asking on wikipedia-l would probably get some nice German to explain this in better detail.
If the restriction is that the use be "non-commercial", then it doesn't matter whether or not they made a profit anyway. Selling DVDs qualifies as commercial regardless of whether or not you make a profit, and under my and probably most interpretations, it qualifies as commercial even if done by a non-profit organization.
I wasn't planning to get into that detail, because non-commercial clauses vary - some allow selling-at-cost, but most don't - but generally speaking, yeah. Non-commercial and taking money do not go together comfortably.
This was very popular, and no doubt a good thing for the project - but it was a commercial venture, and had it contained non-commercial material it wouldn't have been able to go ahead, because the company was distributing it at more than cost. Any form of large-scale distribution is likely to fall afoul of non-commercial clauses, at some point, or at least to clash with them to such an extent that it becomes impractical to do the distribution at anything but a loss.
I wonder how much of the success of the German DVD compared to the lack (AFAIK) of one for the English Wikipedia has to do with the lack of fair use images in the German Wikipedia. I'm sure it's not the only problem, the English Wikipedia is a lot larger and wouldn't even fit on a DVD without some serious trimming anyway.
en: could probably be reduced to a single DVD without *too* much trouble - killing the massive VfD logs and so on would be a start - if you accepted from the start you'd want to prune stuff that wasn't of much use. It's certainly easier for a smaller project - but de: is still a pretty damn large project, even if en: is much bigger.
Personally I think this restriction should be relaxed and the one on non-commercial images tightened. The goal of Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia, not provide images for people to use in commercials or other non-encyclopedia productions.
Mmm. This debate will continue, but as I don't contribute useful images I don't tend to find it worries me much :-)
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk