[WikiEN-l] Non-Commercial Usage

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 11/29/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Mike Finucane wrote:
>
> >      I *do* have a
> > problem if someone -say a newspaper - lifts one of my images from
> > Wikipedia, and uses it instead of paying for their own photography, and
> > makes a profit therefrom.
>
> While I disagree with much of what you have said, I'll admit you have a
> point there, Mike. One reason I'll never release images of my friends or
> family under GFDL or CC is that I don't want to be surprised one day
> by finding that their image has been photoshopped into an ad or a
> commercial for a product or company. The only thing worse would be to
> find that they've been photoshopped into a commercial supporting a
> politician I despise so vehemently that I wouldn't piss on them if
> they were on fire.
>
Wouldn't this violate your friends' and family's right to privacy
and/or publicity?  Even if you could argue that the GFDL is a license
to violate those rights, you don't have the right to grant such a
license for your friends and family.

> One could speculate whether this use amounted to some form of libel --
> based on the assumption that association with a given product, service,
> company or politician could be defamatory -- but in the case of dead
> people, I don't think libel or slander applies. I'm not a lawyer, & I'm
> not looking to start a discussion here on the matter, I'm just explaining
> that I've found a simple solution by avoiding the problem.
>
Ah, good point.  Right to privacy and/or publicity doesn't apply to
dead people either, AFAIK.  Of course, if your friends and family are
dead I don't see why it matters that your pictures of them are used in
a commercial any more than any other pictures you've taken.  If your
picture of an orange was transformed into a commercial for Microsoft
Orange Juice (from concentrate) wouldn't you be just as pissed?

> But what _might_ be worth a conversation -- or at least a moment's
> consideration -- is that introducing GFDL material into an advertisement
> makes that creation GFDL'd too. By using free images (free as in speech,
> not as in beer, as the cliche goes), the advertisement then -- at least
> in part -- becomes free.
>
The aggregation clause is the big loophole in the GFDL that would
probably avoid that.

And - here we go again - the GFDL doesn't work that way anyway. 
Distributing the advertisement without releasing it under the GFDL
might be copyright infringement, but nothing is ever automatically
released under the GFDL.

> This may not stand up in court (the GPL & its related licenses have never
> been tested in court to the best of my knowledge), but the legal uncertainty
> there is strong enough that no businessman will lightly use material
> released under a Gnu-like license. There are enough headaches in publishing
> creative material: why further introduce those surrounding copyright &
> trademark?
>
> But I do wonder at the concept of a GFDL'd commerical, & how that might
> play out in business.
>
I don't really see how this would be much of a big deal, actually. 
But then again, I'm kind of a fan of the idea that copyleft can and
does make business sense (except perhaps for the anti-business, hippy
culture surrounding it evidenced in part by this very thread).

> There's more I could say, but I think a pointer to the lawsuit between
> UC Berkeley & AT&T over the UNIX codebase in the early 1990s is sufficient.
> Half of the people on this mailing list know how free software affected
> the outcome of that case (& probably can discuss it better than I), &
> the other half should read about it.
>
> Geoff

Anthony