I see this from Brian Heater at Tech Crunch on 25 March:
"In a conversation earlier this week, Wikimedia’s Chief Revenue Office, Lisa Gruwell told TechCrunch that this sort of usage doesn’t constitute any sort of formal relationship. Most companies more or less hook into an API to utilize that breadth of knowledge. It’s handy for sure, and *it’s all well within Wikimedia’s fair use rules*, but as with Maher’s letter, the CRO expressed some concerns about seemingly one-sided relationships ... *Smart assistants are certainly playing by the applicable rules when it comes to leveraging that information base.*"[1]
That article I link to has both Katherine (WMF ED) and Lisa (Chief Revenue Officer) asking the companies who use our work for free to "give back." I want them to give back too, but I don't absolve them of their obligation to meaningfully attribute my work and share it with the same rights attached. If it is the opinion of the WMF that these smart assistants are not breaching my rights, I'd like to see the legal advice that opinion is based on.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/24/are-corporations-that-use-wikipedia-giving...
Anthony Cole
On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 5:47 PM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes of course the WMF can contact those who are detected reusing our content without fully complying with licenses and encourage them to comply.
If a case were to go to court it would need to have one or more contributors who were willing to cooperate with WMF legal in the case. But I doubt there would be a shortage of contributors who were keen to do so.
As for why the WMF should do so, here are three reasons:
Each of our wikis is a crowd sourced project. Crowd sourcing requires a crowd, if a crowd settles down and stabilises it becomes a community. The community is broadly stable, but we need a steady flow of new wikimedians, and our only really effective way of recruiting new Wikimedians is for them to see the edit button on our sites. An increasing shift to our content being used without attribution is an existential threat to the project and hence to the WMF.
Our communities are made up of volunteers with diverse motivations. For some of us the BY-SA part of the licensing is important, personally I feel good when i see one of my photos used by someone else but attributed to me. If the de facto policy of the WMF was to treat volunteer contributions as effectively CC0 this would be demotivating for some members of our community. I'm also active on another site where every member regularly gets stats on their readership, something I very much doubt would happen if it wasn't an effective mechanism to encourage continued participation.
Every organisation needs money, the WMF gets most of its money by asking for it on wikipedia and other sites. Again, encouraging attribution back to Wikipedia etc tackles the existential threat of other sites treating wikipedia et al as CC0.
WSC
On 5 April 2018 at 08:04, wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi,
On 04/04/2018 08:36 PM, Anthony Cole wrote:
I'm curious also. I release my articles under "attribution, share
alike"
and rely on WMF to preserve those rights.
Why are you relying on the WMF? Wikipedia contributors (like yourself) are the ones who own copyright to the articles - the WMF doesn't. Unless you've granted/transferred copyright to the WMF (or some other license enforcement agreement), I don't think they can pursue legal action for you or other Wikipedians. (IANAL, etc.)
-- Legoktm
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe