[WikiEN-l] Non-commercial only and By Permission Only Images to be
Neil Harris
usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk
Mon Nov 28 13:07:50 UTC 2005
Mike Finucane wrote:
> I was going to enrich Wikipedia with a whole bunch of my images, but
> quite frankly, i dont want someone getting rich off my work.
> As such, I was intending to add creative commons no commercial use tags.
>
> Then I come across this note from you:
>
> "All images which are for non-commercial only use and by permission only
>> are not acceptable for Wikipedia and _will be deleted_. We have
>> tolerated them for some time..."
>
>
>
> Well fear not; you wont have to tolerate any of my images.
>
> I'm going to have to re-evaluate contributing to wikipedia if its
> based on providing source material for commercial companies.
>
> Feel free to explain WHY you have this policy; but I have to say your
> explanation above wasnt very tactful or conducive to goodwill on my part.
>
I agree, the comment above was perhaps not as tactfully phrased as it
could be. However, here's the reasoning behind the policy:
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, Wikipedia is released under the GNU Free
Documentation License: "free" in this case, means "free as in freedom".
Summarized, it grants the right to redistribute and use material
licensed under it in any way whatsoever, provided that the user
preserves those rights for any other person. This is to ensure the
widest possible use and distribution of the encyclopedia and the
information within it.
This necessarily includes both for-profit and nonprofit uses. However,
it does not mean that Wikipedia is a for-profit enterprise: indeed, the
Wikimedia Foundation which supports it is an explicitly non-profit
organization.
One of the things that you have the freedom to do with Wikipedia is to
distribute it at no cost. 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. However, none of these commercial uses
prevent people from using the information for free; indeed, because the
GFDL requires derivative works also to be licensed under the GFDL, it
means that Wikipedia material, so long as it remains properly licensed
under the GFDL, cannot have its freedom stripped away, even if it is
included in a commercial derivative product.
For example, I would be quite within my rights to make copies of the
articles from a commercially-purchased version of Wikipedia, and to give
them, or indeed the whole encyclopedia, away for free. Any publisher
asserting proprietary rights over Wikipedia material would be in breach
of the GFDL, and would no longer have the right to use the material in
the first place.
However, for this freedom to be useful, all the material in Wikipedia
needs to be released under the GFDL; 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. For this reason, Wikipedia's
copyright rules state that every piece of material in Wikipedia must
either be licenced under the GFDL, or fall under a legitimate exemption
under copyright law (fair use, public domain, and so on).
This is the reason why we (regretfully) cannot accept images or other
material under noncommercial-use-only licences. I understand your desire
not to have other people get rich off your hard work. That is your
right, and what you do with your own copyrighted material is your own
business.
On the other hand, have you considered getting rich off ours?
Under the terms of the GFDL, you are quite welcome to do so; indeed,
every contributor who has licensed their copyrighted material under the
GFDL as part of Wikipedia has explicitly consented to this. Feel free to
publish Wikipedia content as-is, or make commercial derivative works.
The more widely you do this, the happier we will be. I hear that running
Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia can be quite lucrative.
The only constraints are:
* that Wikipedia's collective copyright owners (its authors) insist that
you do so under the terms of the GFDL, a copy of which you can find
online here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License
* that you do not copy Wikipedia pages from the Wikimedia servers in
real-time, but instead work off an offline dump of the encyclopedia (as
the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation does not have the resources for
performing real-time page rendering for commercial enterprises)
-- Neil
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