[Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> Using "free" content as a marketing tool or as a means to drive other
> sources of revenue (e.g. web ads), is certainly a legitimate publishing tool
> and one that is commonly used.  However, I think if you ask Jim Baen Books
> about whether you can republish their books without paying royalties, then
> they will flatly deny such a request.

Sure, and the licenses on their "Free Library" generally are "all
rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work" (despite
which, it's zero cost to download straight off the web in numerous
formats including RTF and all the book readers).

This is the no-cost free versus the fully open content free, in that
regard.  However...

> Copyleft works generally are more
> "free" to the public than the "free" books and music people give away.  In
> other words the public can not only enjoy them, but also build upon them.
>
> I suspect that most of the authors you cite as benefitting from giving away
> free works nonetheless have an expectation that "free" means less than the
> concept of radical freedom that started this diversionary thread.

Cory Doctrow has put a number of his writings into the public domain.
There's not much more free than that.

He's not the only one.

> As Wikipedians, I think we are all committed to giving away the content
> (i.e. no fees for reading the encyclopedia), but the question arising from
> the GFDL vs. CC-BY, etc. is what limitations may be appropriate on the
> additional uses that people might have for that content.  Personally, I am
> glad that Wikipedia is subject to strong copyleft, which serves to ensure
> that we should also benefit from future works that build upon Wikipedia.

This is a case where benefiting from future works that might build on
Wikipedia is done in a manner guaranteed to reduce the chance that
they're actually built that way - it's so hard, for example, to
include more than "fair use" worth of a Wikipedia article in a
copyrighted non-libre licensed book that we see very few requests to
do so.

The reason that I -BY crosslicense my contributions is that I would
like to maximize the chances that someone can find a way to reuse
them.  I would rather that they be reused, even if I see no cent of it
and they're not republished in a fully open redistribution manner,
than not reused at all.

If nobody reuses it, then the potential benefits were all lost.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com