[Wikipedia-l] Stallman on fair use

[Marco Krohn]

On Sunday 15 June 2003 19:20, Lee Pilich wrote:

> Can somebody please explain to me why we, the editors of Wikipedia, should
> be bothered about any context other than Wikipedia? I want to make the
> WIkipedia as good as it can be, and if that involves using fair use
> materials, then so be it. If somebody who makes a derivitive work from the
> Wikipedia can't use our fair use materials as fair use because, say,
> they're charging $50 for whatever product they've created, then I couldn't
> care less.

there have been quite some open source / free software projects which had 
small license issues in the past which turned out to larger problem after 
some time. For instance, I have followed the Qt / KDE / GPL license battle on 
the mailing lists and I can assure you it was not fun seeing this discussion 
coming up over and over again (with all implications, KDE was not allowed 
being a part of Debian for a long time etc.)

The GFDL was written by lawyers. If we don't pay attention and start "mixing" 
this license with "fair use" then we _might_ run into problems in the future.
So we should be very careful now rather than when it is too late.

I still think that GFDL and "fair use" is incompatible. RMS answers seem to 
_me_ a bit inconsistent. On the one hand he says that a combination of FU and 
GFDL is no problem on the other:

me:
"Yes, both parts of the article (image, text) come from the wikipedia server. 
The text is GFDLed, the image is not."

RMS:
"Such combination would violate the GFDL."

Jimbo was so kind asking the question to RMS more precisely and also cc'ed the 
email to Lawrence Lessig (Standford Professor for law). So let's wait a bit 
for their judgement.

best regards,
  Marco