On 11/28/05, Mike Finucane <mike_finucane(a)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