[WikiEN-l] Is fair use a right as well as a defense?

[Wily D]

On 9/10/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wily D wrote:
> > For the most part, there seems to be a strong consensus that we should
> > steer clear of the boundries we could push fair use (or in many of our
> > cases, such as mine, fair dealing) to.
> >
> > As an educational resource - there's probably a lot of space - I'll
> > warn you that I live in a foreign socialist country where we don't
> > believe in copyrights or suing people, so my advice may not be all
> > that great.
> >
> > The issue is - we want to provide a free encyclopaedia for downstream
> > users, who may be commercial in nature.  How do we be free while still
> > being an encyclopaedia?  How do we be an encyclopaedia while still be
> > free?  Tricky ...
> >
> > WilyD
> >
> > On 9/10/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I am not a US lawyer, nor is [[Pamela Jones]] of [[Groklaw]]. But
> >> here's some food for thought:
> >>
> >> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070907195435565
> >>
> >> Despite my personal fondness for slash-and-burning fair abuse on en:wp
> >> and taking away children's eyecandy, I remain a big fan of fair use,
> >> because quotation is a necessary part of being able to talk about
> >> something. [[Golan v. Gonzales]] (that's a red link. Could someone
> >> please write the article?) is the US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
> >> saying it is too.
> >>
> >> So what's Wikipedia and Wikimedia's duty to exercise that right in the
> >> pursuit of educational value?
> >>
> >>
> >> - d.
> >>
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> >>
> >
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> The Germans seem to have solved that question quite well. We took a page
> out of their book on userboxes, maybe we should take the flipside on
> nonfree content too. The way you remain free is to steer clear of
> nonfree. Period, end of story, no exceptions. That's why you don't find,
> for example, the nonfree nvidia driver in the Linux kernel. It could be
> legally distributed that way, sure, but it's not free. Anyone who wants
> it is welcome to download and install their own, but to keep the core
> product (the kernel) free, it must not be distributed as part of it.
>
> To be genuinely free, anyone should be able to take a database dump of
> Wikipedia, and provided that they comply with the GFDL, put it up on a
> commercial website with every last bit of data they got. Wikipedia is
> currently nonfree. A lot of -parts- are free, but it only takes a bit of
> pollution to make the whole nonfree.
>
>
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>

The Germans have done a remarkably poor job in some areas due to this.
 Some of their articles, even on fairly important topics, can never
hope to be any good.  We're trying to write a free encyclopaedia,
which necessarily includes it being an encyclopaedia.  Fair use and
fair dealings exist for a reason - legislators recognise that we
cannot hope to write something like an encyclopaedia without these
rights.  And we can't.

Right now, people can and do take dumps of Wikipedia and put it on
commercial websites with no real legal liability.  The only issues are
for highly transformative uses, or for very small fractions - an
*article* with fair use images can reasonably be extracted and
mirrored, but a fair use image alone cannot be extracted and say - put
on a postcard.

So the english Wikipedia isn't a source of strictly free content.  But
it is a free encyclopaedia, and we are taking strong steps to ensure
that downstream users who want to reuse content outside of an
encyclopaedia can easily identify and remove anything they can't use.
And in the end, it doesn't cost us any free content - nonfree content
is only permitted where free content could never be produced anyhow

In the end, if the community has to choose between producing strictly
free content and producing a free encyclopaedia, I'd put dollars to
dimes they'd choose the latter.

WilyD