I wonder if $100 million dollars could change the law itself in the US... that could free up a lot of resources especially ones that are orphaned.
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Hoi, When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a better return on investment from what we do for other languages and cultures.
The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
Thanks, GerardM
Don Green wrote:
I wonder if $100 million dollars could change the law itself in the US... that could free up a lot of resources especially ones that are orphaned.
On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a better return on investment from what we do for other languages and cultures. The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their copyright laws.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a better return on investment from what we do for other languages and cultures. The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their copyright laws.
- d.
Hoi, Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a waste of money. There are so many productive things that can be done with it. There is so much content that is need of preservation. Things that are not available in any US repository. There is so much even in US repositories that is NOT English that needs preservation..
The Wikimedia Foundation is about content. By doing what we do best, the creation of content and making this content available, we make the business model of proprietary knowledge more and more problematic. By becoming an ever important factor for the availability of knowledge, our position will be such that we will have as a consequence increased influence on the politics behing copy right. Combine this with the growing realisation that science is hampered by the effects of copyright the momentum is ours anyway.
If there was one situation where I would agree that some action was warranted, it would be when the USA decides the copyright period yet again. This would be a good moment to move the Wikimedia Foundation to a more benign country. Being realistic however, it would have more symbolic meaning than actual effect given what American judges to organisations that are clearly outside their jurisdiction like in the Spamhouse case.
Thanks, GerardM
Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a waste of money.
And resources. I contribute to the Wiki to help provide an alternative to the marketingspeak and lawyer-writen short-term memory that forms a surprising amount of the 'web. Political lobbying is the sort of thing I come to the wiki to avoid.
I still think everyone is much too focused on "big content". I'm much more concerned about the huge amount of non-commercial content that gets stamped with a copyright without the author having any idea of how that works. I have posted on this before, and the answers were always "well that's what CC is for". True as that may be, no-one's ever heard of it. _I_ never heard of it until coming to the wiki.
Consider the millions of snapshots that are taken every week and posted on the 'net. One or two of them would improve the wiki, I'm sure, but we can't use them. Not because the snapshot-taker has any intension of making money, but because it was copyrighted "by default" and they are completely unaware of it. This has happened to me repeatedly when trying to get images for articles. And contrary to the claims here, most librarians and archivists are completely unaware of either the problem or the solutions.
So I still think education would be a good use of these funds. Who cares about the big media houses when there is so much content out there that's free but shackled? Let's try to fix THAT problem, lets make sure people know there is a better way.
Maury
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Maury Markowitz wrote:
Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a waste of money.
And resources. I contribute to the Wiki to help provide an alternative to the marketingspeak and lawyer-writen short-term memory that forms a surprising amount of the 'web. Political lobbying is the sort of thing I come to the wiki to avoid.
Some people don't mind doing that; they even find it fun. That doesn't mean that you have to do it when there are so many other things here that you might find more enjoyable.
I still think everyone is much too focused on "big content". I'm much more concerned about the huge amount of non-commercial content that gets stamped with a copyright without the author having any idea of how that works. I have posted on this before, and the answers were always "well that's what CC is for". True as that may be, no-one's ever heard of it. _I_ never heard of it until coming to the wiki.
I'm familiar with your point. Too many of our colleagues prefer the risk of castration to the risk of even remotely breaking their uninformed vision of the law.
Consider the millions of snapshots that are taken every week and posted on the 'net. One or two of them would improve the wiki, I'm sure, but we can't use them. Not because the snapshot-taker has any intension of making money, but because it was copyrighted "by default" and they are completely unaware of it. This has happened to me repeatedly when trying to get images for articles. And contrary to the claims here, most librarians and archivists are completely unaware of either the problem or the solutions.
As things stand that is a political issue. The law clearly gives them copyright protection whether they want it or not. Politicians need to consider this in dealing with orphan copyrights. Unfortunately, we have too many admins whose willingness to deal with the problem shows them to have all the abilities they need to grovel with politicians.
So I still think education would be a good use of these funds. Who cares about the big media houses when there is so much content out there that's free but shackled? Let's try to fix THAT problem, lets make sure people know there is a better way.
I'm pessimistic. The best education is for people to go ahead and do it.
Ec
I'm pessimistic. The best education is for people to go ahead and do it.
Maybe, but you have to hear about it first. I didn't. No one I know has. So who HAS heard of CC other than a few wiki-laywers and nerds? Can the number of people in the general public that are aware of these issues be represented on a handheld calculator?
Maury
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On 10/24/06, Maury Markowitz maury_markowitz@hotmail.com wrote:
Maybe, but you have to hear about it first. I didn't. No one I know has. So who HAS heard of CC other than a few wiki-laywers and nerds? Can the number of people in the general public that are aware of these issues be represented on a handheld calculator?
My handhold calculator handles up to 10^99, so that's not really a great way of describing it ;) But I suspect you meant within seven digits or so, so I suspect no more than a few million people worldwide have even heard of it, yes.
A fairly large number of people on Flickr use CC licenses, for example, but almost all of them pick 'non-commercial', since that option is there and the knee-jerk reaction is 'Of course I don't want corporations profiting off my work!'.
Some education/evangelism about free content and its benefits is probably in order.
-Matt
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a better return on investment from what we do for other languages and cultures. The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their copyright laws.
Hoi, Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a waste of money. There are so many productive things that can be done with it. There is so much content that is need of preservation. Things that are not available in any US repository. There is so much even in US repositories that is NOT English that needs preservation.
Spending that whole amount trying to change US law would be very wasteful. Designating a _small_ part of it to influence what can be realistically accomplished would not be out of line. This would apply to both US and other countries' laws.
For the rest of it I absolutely agree with you. One impression that I get from many people's posts is a failure to grasp the enormous scope of the problem. While I don't completely oppose copying a novel from Project Gutenberg to Wikisource, in most cases that only amounts to moving an existing solution sideways. There is more benefit to be gained by adding material that is not yet on line anywhere, or that is ted up by ridiculous proprietary agreements.
The Wikimedia Foundation is about content. By doing what we do best, the creation of content and making this content available, we make the business model of proprietary knowledge more and more problematic. By becoming an ever important factor for the availability of knowledge, our position will be such that we will have as a consequence increased influence on the politics behing copy right. Combine this with the growing realisation that science is hampered by the effects of copyright the momentum is ours anyway.
Absolutely.
If there was one situation where I would agree that some action was warranted, it would be when the USA decides the copyright period yet again. This would be a good moment to move the Wikimedia Foundation to a more benign country. Being realistic however, it would have more symbolic meaning than actual effect given what American judges to organisations that are clearly outside their jurisdiction like in the Spamhouse case.
"Spamhaus" rather than "Spamhouse" for those who are not finding it.
We've got 11 years before the United States again has to deal with pressure from the Disney Corporation on this. A lot can happen in the interim. We can certainly be more pro-active than waiting for the opportunity to react to a legislative initiative with which we disagree. In such a case as you point out the choice of a "benign" country would not be that simple; it couldn't be a member of the EU. There is no model for a large multinational non-profit corporation. The kind of move that you suggest can be an important factor in contingency planning, but that should not imply any kind of absolute commitment to the action that you suggest. Building an infrastructure that would include redundancy and allow for an almost instantaneous move of the central node to any of several sites or countries seems like a more sensible plan. The conceivable scenarios that would require such a move go well beyond displeasure with US copyright law.
Jurisdiction for internet cases is not a simple issue. US anti-spam legislation has been strenghthened since the Spamhaus suit was filed so it's not clear if the results would be the same. The US isn't the only country trying to claim jurisdiction in internet cases. Some countries claim that merely having residents who download from a copyright site is enough to give them jurisdiction. There is a notable Australian case on this.
Ec
What I would very much like to see is the purchase and release of images that are themselves in the public domain, but are still locked in a stranglehold by museums and libraries that claim they have copyright on the photographs of those images. This is particularly true in the UK where museums and libraries typically charge large fees for reproductions, then large fees for using the images; sometimes the claim for copyright of the photographs of materials in the public domain is also made in the USA--where Bridgeman vs Corel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_vs_Corel) has set a precedent but hasn't been endorsed by the Supreme Court; and sometimes this claim for copyright is made in Canada as well. I don't know a lot about other countries, but probably there are similar issues all over the world: large organizations that are supposed to be stewards of cultural history in fact are hoarders of it. The result is that a huge portion of our history is too expensive for many people to see and and admire and study, and oftentimes too expensive or legally too problematic for scholars to include in their published studies.
APM
David Gerard wrote:
On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a better return on investment from what we do for other languages and cultures. The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their copyright laws.
I don't see that as necessarily the case. For a long time US copyright law had renewals. Despite some completely understandable difficulties I think this was a good idea in general. That is gone. The US also based copyright terms on date of publication rather than the death date of the author; that too was changed in 1976 to conform with international rules. The US has not (yet) adopted database protection laws that could result in keeping some material protected indefinitely even when it is already in the public domain.
The EU has done a fine job of building laws to support bureaucracy, and there is an unfortunate unwillingness on the part of EU members to adopt legislative positions that would run contrary to the bureaucratizing trends of the EU administrators. While it is important to keep US legislation moving in the direction of openness, it is as illusory to believe that this openness will trickle down to other countries as it is to believe in trickle-down economics. Far more effort needs to be directed at the EU, whose administration only magnifies the amateurishness of our own AfD clique.
Too often when the issue of making information available to everybody the brick wall is not in the US but in the EU. In many respects other activities by the US in other unrelated matters have pointed to an abandonment of moral leadership. The effect of that is toward a disinclination on the part of other countries to follow the US lead, even when it would be beneficial to do so. I don't see Europe doing anything to accept leadership. I see one fat orange cat sitting in Brussels ignoring its herd of Odies.
Unlike Gerard I don't think this should become a matter of the English language versus other languages. If the issue is a question of laws that has nothing to do with the language in which those laws are written. If it has to do with the language of material to be put into our databases, there are non-English materials in US depositories that can as easily be put into the database. The fact nevertheless remains that it takes people familiar with a language to make informed decisions about what should be included. I understand the lack of support for OCR in other scripts, notably those of Asia, but again don't expect people whose everyday life is exclusively in a Roman script to have the ability to develop that technical support.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a better return on investment from what we do for other languages and cultures. The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their copyright laws.
I don't see that as necessarily the case. For a long time US copyright law had renewals. Despite some completely understandable difficulties I think this was a good idea in general. That is gone. The US also based copyright terms on date of publication rather than the death date of the author; that too was changed in 1976 to conform with international rules. The US has not (yet) adopted database protection laws that could result in keeping some material protected indefinitely even when it is already in the public domain.
The EU has done a fine job of building laws to support bureaucracy, and there is an unfortunate unwillingness on the part of EU members to adopt legislative positions that would run contrary to the bureaucratizing trends of the EU administrators. While it is important to keep US legislation moving in the direction of openness, it is as illusory to believe that this openness will trickle down to other countries as it is to believe in trickle-down economics. Far more effort needs to be directed at the EU, whose administration only magnifies the amateurishness of our own AfD clique.
Too often when the issue of making information available to everybody the brick wall is not in the US but in the EU. In many respects other activities by the US in other unrelated matters have pointed to an abandonment of moral leadership. The effect of that is toward a disinclination on the part of other countries to follow the US lead, even when it would be beneficial to do so. I don't see Europe doing anything to accept leadership. I see one fat orange cat sitting in Brussels ignoring its herd of Odies.
Unlike Gerard I don't think this should become a matter of the English language versus other languages. If the issue is a question of laws that has nothing to do with the language in which those laws are written. If it has to do with the language of material to be put into our databases, there are non-English materials in US depositories that can as easily be put into the database. The fact nevertheless remains that it takes people familiar with a language to make informed decisions about what should be included. I understand the lack of support for OCR in other scripts, notably those of Asia, but again don't expect people whose everyday life is exclusively in a Roman script to have the ability to develop that technical support.
Ec
Hoi, Well as we are dreaming, creating support for the support of OCR for scripts other than the Roman languages would be a good idea.. Remember we are dreaming about spending 100.000.000 US. I am sure we will find developers in countries where there are MANY scripts like Iran that will be quite happy to help us with this. It is also not hard to find developers to do a similar thing in Ghana or Nigeria.
Where Ray does not find a reason to spend money in non-Roman language countries, I find many reasons; there is this obvious need and, you do buy more developer time for your money. Given the huge amount of data that is already available for the Roman language cultures, it would very much open up cultures that are unknown to us. Not only that by being genuinely interested in other cultures, the world will become more diverse. It will also benefit the local cultures and it will prevent the blindness that you get when people do not know their history. Then again, there are many cultures that have a past that is almost unknown because of political machinations allowing politicians to play their game of divide and conquer.
Concluding, spend money on opening up historical documents of the forgotten and often despised cultures. Spend money on what is considered our enemies. This way we will not only learn to appreciate other heritages than our own, we will learn that all human knowledge is our heritage. I would suggest that that lesson alone is worth $ 100.000.000.- It beats going to war in the productivity department.
Thanks, GerardM
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