[Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

[John Vandenberg]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Johan Jönsson <brevlistor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/5/22 Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi at gmx.net>:
>
>> You don't say who "we" are, but in case some people think the Wikimedia
>> Foundation should position itself on "copyright" matters much beyond
>> which licenses it is using and why, and which problems Wikipedia might
>> be facing due to various aspects of "copyright", the likely result is,
>> "This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as
>> a bad move" especially if it comes as specific as the suggestion above.
>
> Yes. Very much so.

I agree.  What problems does Wikipedia face?  Some of the Wikipedia,
and other projects, allow non-free media where they are necessary to
support the goals of the project.  Some projects don't allow non-free
media, but most of our mission can be adequately achieved with plain
text, and should be obtained in pure text in order to meet the needs
of people with vision impairments that mean they can't see images.

A limit on copyright increases our pool of resources at some point in
the future (5 years, 14 years, etc) as no government will attempt to
push existing works into the public domain by having a retroactive new
copyright duration.

My bet is that our firm commitment to CC-BY-SA will mean that the
copyright landscape will be quite different in 14 years.

If we want to have an extra impact, I think we should campaign to
redefine January 1 as (Anti-)Mickey Mouse Day, and promote it as the
day that Mickey Mouse Act / Disney has prevented the commons from
being enriched.  We could list all of the works which would be public
domain in the US if Mickey Mouse had never existed.

--
John Vandenberg