[Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 06:14:13AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 09:25:47PM -0500, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > > Not sure what's *horrible* about no derivative works.  Wikipedia doesn't 
> > > need to alter most images.  I'd take cc-nd over copyrighted with fair 
> > > use.  If cc-nd is completely unacceptable, then so is fair use, right?
> > 
> > Right. "Fair use" is completely unacceptable.
> 
> Tomasz is speaking for himself, not for me, nor the Wikimedia
> Foundation, nor the FSF, nor in the true spirit of freedom.
> 
> Under Tomasz's interpretation, it would be impossible for us to even
> quote from a copyrighted book in an article about the author of that
> book.  This is not freedom, this is copyright paranoia.
> 
> We do need to be careful about "fair use", because it does raise some
> potential issues for some re-users.  And we should strongly prefer
> freely licensed alternatives where they are available.  But fair use
> (or "fair dealing" as it is called in most other countries and under
> the Berne convention) is acceptable.

Using short text quotations places few limits on use, modification and
distribution of a work.

The same can't be said about using "fair use" images - you can't use them
for commercial purposes, you can't distribute them if it involves some profit,
and the same applies to any modifications of them.

Please don't confuse these two cases just because they fall under single
principle in the US law. I'm not in any way against quotations, but most
of the "fair use" images put on English Wikipedia aren't any more Free
than "non-commercial use, download from official site only" kind of software.