[WikiEN-l] No derivatives (was: Would you like one of your videos posted on Wikipedia?)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 9/19/06, dmehkeri at swi.com <dmehkeri at swi.com> wrote:
> Eh, why is that anyway? I understand why we would dislike it, of course, but I'm
> not sure why, exactly, we would want to make it a deal-breaker. (We, english
> Wikipedia, rather than say, Wikimedia Commons which has slightly different goals.)
[sni]

Is not *Free Content*, it is incompatible (in both spirit and
intention) with the GFDL, and it would inhibit intended applications
of Wikipedia.

Even if you forget that Wikipedia has creating Free Content as one of
its two primary goals (the other of which is creating an
Encyclopedia), and only consider making a no-cost encyclopedia:

Consider what happens if we make a print version of Wikipedia with
color images in black and white? Is that a derived work?   What if we
need to adjust some of the colors in the image to preserve contrast in
the black and white conversion?

What about cropping?  It is common on english wikipedia to crop images
to preserve their informative content in the small amount of screen
real estate we have available... (As an aside I think we often take
cropping too far)...

Translations, rearrangements, .. etc there is no shortage of examples
of places where we've altered images to further our goal of creating
an encyclopedia. This is all possible because we require illustrations
people create for our project to be Free Content.

[snip]
> For starters it isn't mentioned in the copyright FAQ at all.
[snip]

The copyright FAQ is mostly written for users of content in Wikipedia.
Not creators of Wikipedia content. See [[Wikipedia:Image use policy]]
which states "You can prove that the copyright holder has licensed the
image under a free license."

[snip]
> We would, obviously, rather have everything under one license. But we allow
> incompatible media copylefts, like CC-BY-SA and GFDL, even though it means we
> can't, say, make a derivative image based on two images with incompatible
> copylefts.

Although GFDL and CC-By-SA are technically incompatible, they are
largely compatible in principle.  If your use of an article conforms
to the GFDL, then it will easily conform to the CC-By-SA terms of
included images.

[snip]
>We even allow "fair use" under some restricted circumstances. This
> does not allow for derivative works either, and in fact poses downstream
> problems.

Our intention of allowing fair use images is to fulfil our
encyclopedic goals for material which can not be made available under
another license.

The downstream implication is that if we have a valid fair use claim
and they are doing something similar to us, then they should have a
fair use claim as well.

[snip]
> So it's obvious why we would rather not have no-derivative media licenses, but
> it's not obvious to me why we would absolutely insist upon it, the way we
> absolutely insist upon allowing commercial use or what have you.

Because our absolute insistence increases the amount of Free Content.

"Rather not" is meaningless if we do not put teeth behind it.