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

[Jimmy Wales]

dmehkeri at swi.com wrote:

> digging, it does seem to be disallowed. For rationale, I get pointed back to
> either Jimbo's posts on disallowing non-commercial-use media licenses, fair use,
> or discussion of downstream use. 
> 
> None of these reasons seem to apply here. For the free encyclopedia, a CC-BY-ND
> media license, for example, is perfectly redistributable, allows for possible
> commercial use, and poses no issues for forks or other downstream use, right? 

When we talk about Wikipedia being free, we refer to the 4 freedoms of 
free software, as defined by Richard Stallman many years ago:

0. The freedom to copy
1. The freedom to redistribute
2. The freedom to modify
3. The freedom to redistribute modified versions

CC-BY-NC violates at least the last of these.

Why do we care?  Because we want people to be able to adapt our work for 
their own purposes.  It is difficult for us to foresee what those 
purposes might be.

Perhaps an artist wants to create a Digital Dream Booth... you walk into 
it, and say some concept like "Iraq" and dozens of images drawn from 
Wikipedia, interspersed with snippets of text, cascade down around you 
dissolving and forming in unusual ways.  The images are digitally 
morphed, one into the next.

This is clearly going to involve making derivative works of our images.

--Jimbo