On Fri, 30 May 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote in part:
So by analogy "Linus Torvalds style pragmatism" might provide for a third-party filter program that inserts non-FDL images into Wikipedia articles on a reader's computer as they're loaded. ;)
Like a web browser? That's a third-party program that inserts Wikipedia's images into Wikipedia's articles on a reader's computer as they're loaded.
...automatically upon the programmed instructions contained in the page, without permission of the copyright owner of the image, without instruction or intervention by the user.
The HTML document (the article) that we serve them has no image; we also serve them the image, which they request in reaction to our article (much as a module may be requested in reaction to the kernel's actions), but that's under fair use, not GFDL.
Compare again: * the modules are distributed by their owners, *not* with the GPL kernel * the images are distributed with the GFDL articles, *not* by their owners
* the modules are installed and loaded by deliberate action of the user on the user's machine, not automatically by the kernel * the images are loaded automatically upon the instructions in the article page without user intervention
* the kernel-module combination is never redistributed * the article-image combination is redistributed by local saving, hardcopy, mirroring, or format conversion of the articles unless careful effort is made to avoid including the image (which the article includes programmatic commands to include)
Most importantly, the paradigm of separate text and image files is simply a technical limitation of the HTML format used. If Wikipedia were distributed in PostScript, PDF, MS Word documents, RTF, or the printed page, there would be no such separation. ('Material printed in black ink is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and may be redistributed and modified under those terms. Material in cyan, magenta, and/or yellow inks which *just happens* to be on the same pages and *just happens* to be about things mentioned in the text and *just happens* to have been placed there by modifying the GFDL source text to include it is used without permission of the copyright holder and can't be reused except under very limited circumstances. These are actually separate documents, you see, having been printed by separate inks, but for convenience all four documents have been placed on the same page. They are not related in any way. It's just a fluke!')
As it is, the GFDL pages we distribute include commands with the explicit purpose of embedding particular non-GFDL material inside them, and correct loading of pages is expected to load the images and display them transparently without the user needing to notice that the data comes in several chunks with different filenames. To claim they are separate documents is at the least deceptive.
The problem, it seems to me, isn't that we use the images, but that we pretend that we're using them under the GFDL.
Either we are, or we're violating the license of every article that someone has modified by putting a non-GFDL picture into it.
They're already separated out a bit (not in the download, after all), and we should separate them (or the non-free ones) out further, rather than claiming in some places that we're entirely free and GFDL, while claiming in other places that we use some images through fair use. (I'd even support placing fair use images in a separate namespace and database from the free ones, just to make things ultraclear.) Our fair use images should be treated as *auxiliary*.
I'm all in favor of putting them on a separate server with a separate database and *not* embedding those images inline into articles, but allowing explicitly external links to those images which users would have to follow knowingly.
nonfree.wikipedia.org, anyone?
(even though we say it's absolutely vital that we include these images to have a legitimate encyclopedia).
It should ''never'' be vital to an article that we include an image, if we can help it, not only for distribution but also for accessibility.
Thanks! This removes the sense of urgency that drives some people to add non-free images knowing they are not compatible with the project's goals. Hopefully they'll stop immediately. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)