--- Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Sat, 2003-03-01 at 08:58, Axel Boldt wrote:
--- Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
It might, if this were a project that fights against intellectual property rights. It isn't. It's a project that fights *for* intellectual property rights *for everyone*.
... as long as it is understood that "everyone" is defined as "everyone who is able and willing to use a license compatible with GFDL". Those who for various reasons use one of the couple dozen incompatible open content licenses are granted by us only a single right: the right to read. That's exactly what they get from encyclopedia.com as well.
Nonsense. They have the right to use and reuse and redistribute and modify and rerelease the GFDL content _under the GFDL license_.
You will notice that that is exactly the case I excluded above.
Concretely, the guy who is writing or contributing to a science textbook under a license that prohibits commercial distribution, or doesn't require authorship acknowledgements, or doesn't allow invariant sections, or allows modifications without changing the title etc. etc. does not get anything out of Wikipedia. No intellectual property rights for this dude.
And there will be many dudes like him. Lawrence Lessig just collected a cool $2M grant for his little crappy project of polluting the world with a maze of countless open content licenses, all slightly different.
If we dilute the protections by letting any old license be used, you can expect a read-only embraced & extended version of Wikipedia peppered with material that's uncopyable under any license. If that's your idea of freedom,
So Encyclopedia Britannica sucks in the Wikipedia contents, locks them up and improves upon them. Does that hurt me in any way? Or anybody else for that matter? I still have precisely the same amount of freedom I had before they decided to to that. Wikipedia is still free. If anything, I benefit because more people get to read my material and I get to read Britannica's improvements.
Axel
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