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
At that point the /only/ thing you would be able to do is just read Britannica's improvements.
Without the protections of the GNU FDL you would not be able to improve on their improvements. Thus Britannica improves and Wikipedia doesn't - the positive feedback cycle ends with the imprisonment of a version of the content.
Thanks to the GNU FDL the content always improves and is always free. Britannica is more than welcome to incorporate our content but any changes they make would have to be licensed under the GNU FDL. Thus that gives us the /freedom/ to improve upon their improvements. Default copyright forbids them to use the content at all and the public domain only grants freedom in one direction.
I for one would not contribute to Wikipedia if it were in the public domain.
--mav
WikiKarma: The usual at [[February 25]]
--- Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
I for one would not contribute to Wikipedia if it were in the public domain.
Yes, and I'm sure you are not alone there. Attracting contributors is the major strength of copyleft licenses in my view, and that's why they are useful. I don't even argue that Wikipedia should switch to public domain, and of course that would be entirely impossible to do now.
What I don't like is if copyleft licenses are sold as increasing freedoms and intellectual property rights, when there are lots of people, even ones opposed to traditional copyright concepts, who are concretely restricted in their choices because of them. Ultimately, these licenses are strategic instruments, tradeoffs, and should be understood as such.
What I am arguing for, I guess, is that Wikipedia contributors who don't need the additional motivation of copyleft anymore, and who have already lost the notions of authorship and ownership enshrined in GFDL, release their contributions into the public domain early (eventually they will fall into the public domain anyway). That doesn't diminish the strategic value of GFDL in any way, but can help potential users of the materials quite substantially.
Axel
__________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org