--- Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On Sat, 2003-03-01 at 08:58, Axel Boldt wrote:
--- Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
It might, if this were a project that fights
against intellectual
property rights. It isn't. It's a project that fights *for*
intellectual property rights *for everyone*.
... as long as it is understood that "everyone" is defined as
"everyone who is able and willing to use a license compatible
with GFDL". Those who for various reasons use one of the couple
dozen incompatible open content licenses are granted by us only a
single right: the right to read. That's exactly what they get
from
encyclopedia.com as well.
Nonsense. They have the right to use and reuse and redistribute and
modify and rerelease the GFDL content _under the GFDL license_.
You will notice that that is exactly the case I excluded above.
Concretely, the guy who is writing or contributing to a science
textbook under a license that prohibits commercial distribution, or
doesn't require authorship acknowledgements, or doesn't allow invariant
sections, or allows modifications without changing the title etc. etc.
does not get anything out of Wikipedia. No intellectual property rights
for this dude.
And there will be many dudes like him. Lawrence Lessig just collected a
cool $2M grant for his little crappy project of polluting the world
with a maze of countless open content licenses, all slightly different.
If we dilute the protections by letting any old
license be
used, you can expect a read-only embraced & extended version of
Wikipedia peppered with material that's uncopyable under any license.
If that's your idea of freedom,
So Encyclopedia Britannica sucks in the Wikipedia contents, locks them
up and improves upon them. Does that hurt me in any way? Or anybody
else for that matter? I still have precisely the same amount of freedom
I had before they decided to to that. Wikipedia is still free. If
anything, I benefit because more people get to read my material and I
get to read Britannica's improvements.
Axel
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