On 28/11/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)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(a)dunelm.org.uk