On 3/2/14, 6:17 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 2 March 2014 16:56, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
On 3/2/14, 5:31 PM, Chris McKenna wrote:
There is a further disconnect in that Commons is taking an increasingly ultra-conservative approach to the definition of "Free", whereas most other projects are working to a definition of "Free for all practical purposes". It is the latter interpretation that the board, in consultation with the legal team, are recommending as the way forward but is being resisted strongly by many on Commons.
This is more the crux of the issue, I think. I'm mostly familiar with en.wiki, but on there the definition swings pretty far to the opposite extreme, with a lot of content that is *not* Free for most practical purposes.
This discussion is not even about en:wp or its content; you are derailing the discussion.
You argued that there is a big divergence between the goals of Commons and those of the other projects, and that Commons is the outlier diverging from the Movement's goals. I am arguing that isn't the case, and Commons is in fact closer to the movement's goals than the projects that have been complaining.
As someone interested in reusing Wikipedia content outside of the "main" countries of origin (en.wiki content in Denmark, in my case), I actually find Commons's copyright policy one of the few useful things helping out reusers, which is one reason I'm defending it. Here is one heuristic for "freeing-up" a Wikipedia article: for each image, look to see if it's locally hosted or hosted on Commons. Keep it if it's hosted on Commons, remove it if it's locally hosted. This will remove *most*, though not all, of the unfree or free-only-in-one-country images, meaning I can them (probably) legally publish the resulting article in Denmark. Of course, a detailed case-by-case copyright investigation is still the gold standard, but we're not very useful to reusers if everyone has to engage in one, and we can't present people a body of "proably free for you to reuse" content. That's what I think Commons is doing fairly well, or at least better than the other projects.
To the extent that other projects are, as you advocating, "routing around Commons", they are routing around free content and reusers' ability to actually reuse our content— in multiple countries, in multiple settings, by nonprofits and for-profits, in part or in whole.
-Mark