body:
"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:

> First, you phrase ii) in a way that makes it appear the only danger would be
> that "non-educational" (implying: bad)

No such implication was intended.  The point is, educational uses are subject
to different criteria to judge what is and is not fair use.
e.g. one may be allowed to print a picture in a textbook, or a review, that
one would not be allowed to market on a T-Shirt.

> projects would "exploit" (very bad) Wikipedia

Again, thats your inferrence, not my implication.
Non-commercial uses get more leniency from the courts.

> In many countries outside the USA, _any_ project, not just non-educational
> projects, would be dissallowed to use (not "exploit") Wikipedia material.

You appear to greatly misunderstand the nature of the World Wide Web.
To supply the world, we need only publish in the US.

We need not concern ourselves with what whether the information may be
published in Spain, Wales or Finland any more than we concern ourselves with
whether it may be published in North Korea.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

body:
On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

> > We could make even better articles if we copied stuff directly from other,
> > commercial encyclopedias. I think this is legal on some island states.
>
> Wikipedia isn't hosted in an island state.
> This is a thoroughly idiotic, strawman argument.

No, it's an "reductio ad absurdum" argument. And it's not idiotic.

The points I'm making are:

1) Wikipedia isn't an American project, even though it's currently hosted
there. We should make it as good as possible within as wide a legal framework
as possible.

2) Does the fact that we can _get away_ with fair use mean we should do it? We
could probably get away with a lot of suspicious activities that would increase
Wikipedia article output which we aren't pursuing. Just because you can,
doesn't mean it's right. To me it's the difference between short term goals and
long term goals.

-- Daniel


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

body:
> They are easy to replace with nothing though. I think it's worth it.

What about for instance book covers?
They are definitely not something you can usually have under a free licence. But
fair use probably applies (since the cover isn't the book itself).

Sure we could just not put'em. But sometimes they make the article on said book
nicer, and may illustrate, in case of comics, stuff like that, what it looks
like. Which is definitely something adding value to the article, imo.

Nicolas


from_name: Gareth Owen

body:
"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:

> Fair use is illegal in many large countries outside the US.

But the Wikipedia servers are not in any of those countries,
and so this is completely irrelevant.

Are we to scour the world for the most strict censorship laws
in order to comply with those as well?

That won't leave much of an encyclopedia.
--
Gareth Owen


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

body:
It sounds as if some of you are talking about hypothetical situation of
wikipedia contents used in other countries. But I think that kind of use is
happening on a daily basis.

Just to illustrate what Taw and Daniel have said:

When a Japanese Wikipedian posts an unattributed image from en: (or
somewhere else) to Japanese Wikipedia, then it seems that Japanese court can
apply Japanese law to such action and give appropriate protection to the
copyright holder - Berne Convention seems to offer a ground to give such
protection to foreigners bringing lawsuits in Japanese court. And,
importantly, Japanese courts have repeatedly denied fair use in Japanese
copyright law (even though some defendants advocated that it should exist.)
There are only more specific exemptions defined in the copyright law.

Legal technicalities aside (and please be reminded that I am not a lawyer),
moral implication of this is that for some Japanese wikipedians, fair-use is
non-free. We may some day start a project of tracking those images'
copyright status, just so that Japanese wikipedia can remain free.

I found, in particular, Erik's and mav's arguments both attractive - though
they are opposing positions.

But if images based on fair-use exist, I really hope they are unmistakably
clearly attributed.

If I can push a bit more, it would be better if fair-use texts are treated
in the same way, limited to clear quotes, not mingled with other texts.
Well, I suppose this would sound really inconvenient or impractical, but if
it doesn't happen either Japanese wikipedians or further downstream user
might have to handle that inconvenience...

cheers,

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
Take off on a romantic weekend or a family adventure to these great U.S.
locations. http://special.msn.com/local/hotdestinations.armx


body:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Sascha Noyes wrote:

> I agree with you that we shouldn't use a fair-use image for hard to get hold
> of images such as some exotic animal or plant. Only depictions we could only
> include if we were to convince the author to license it under the gfdl. (eg.
> historical events, or if some copyright-retaining government takes pictures
> of water on mars, etc.)

I apologize for not having paid careful enough attention to your earlier posts
regarding the matter.

However, it's my opinion that your suggestion would be too complicated and also
too tempting. I think we will be better off in the long run if the policy is no
non free images at all.

Poorer articles than if we allowed some non-free images? Perhaps. But that
small relative difference is drowned out (imo) by Wikipedia being as insanely
comprehensive and well written as it is - and will be, in a few years.

Whereas the risk of "fair use" contamination at the expense of free images
could be very significant in the long run. Again, imo.

-- Daniel


body:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Nicolas Weeger wrote:

> > They are easy to replace with nothing though. I think it's worth it.
>
> What about for instance book covers?
> They are definitely not something you can usually have under a free licence. But
> fair use probably applies (since the cover isn't the book itself).
>
> Sure we could just not put'em. But sometimes they make the article on said book
> nicer, and may illustrate, in case of comics, stuff like that, what it looks
> like. Which is definitely something adding value to the article, imo.

Certainly. But my point is that Wikipedia isn't about adding value to articles
at any expense.

And I think the expense is too great here.

-- Daniel


references:
<20040219184210.J50567-100000@unity.copyleft.no>
	<r5in07f7ygv.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219175650.GA9571@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ieksr7xsu.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
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	<r5ioerv6i90.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219184852.GA9772@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:

> Wikipedia was meant to be *Free* (capital "F") encyclopedia, and a lot of
> people want it that way.

Actually, wikipedia was meant to be little more than a chalkboard for Nupedia.
Things change.  It's a funny old world.

[aside]
The initial decisions were made before anyone could possibly be aware of the
repercussions.  One such decision was the adoption of the GFDL, a license
designed for software documentation (that I consider horribly flawed for
pretty much anything else).

Now, we can adapt, and say
    "All the original content is GFDL, but as an educational project
     we're going to illustrate it with images under the Fair Use provision
     (as provided by US laws), because we can legally do so and it makes the
     product better"

or we can say
    "Everything on *.wikipedia.org must be GFDL licensed,"

Or, as others here have noted, we can have our cake and eat it.
Keep the Fair Use photos on the US servers (good product) but mark
non-Free images and automagically maintain separate tarballs of Free and
non-Free stuff.  Like Debian did for years and years...
[/aside]

> If you can't live with Wikipedia being Free, find another project.

And wikipedia-l's embarrassing metamorphosis into debian-legal continues.

You are Branden Robinson, and I claim my five pounds.

> > Why do you continue to conflate Fair Use and illegality?
>
> In Europe there isn't much difference.

Given this is a US based project, that sentence has the double
distinction of both completely untrue and utterly irrelevant.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


body:
"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:

> It's entirely conceivable that a large country (say France) would make it
> illegal to access Wikipedia for its citizens

A large country has.  China's great firewall blocks much of wikipedia.
We *could* amend it so that its acceptable to the Chinese government.
We *could* amend it so that its acceptable to the French government.

Personally, I'm not in favour of that.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

references:
<20040219184210.J50567-100000@unity.copyleft.no>
	<r5in07f7ygv.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219175650.GA9571@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ieksr7xsu.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>

body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 06:02:09PM +0000, Gareth Owen wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:
>
> > They have pretty decent pipes and they don't care much about foreign
> > copyrights.
>
> Taiwan is a signatory to the Copyright Treaty.  What you suggest is illegal.

Ouch, it seems they were forced to change the law to get into WTO.

Pre-WTO situation:

http://www.wangandwang.com/cr-info.htm
In Taiwan, ownership of the copyright to a work is granted to Taiwan nationals
upon completion of the work. By virtue of the 1946 Friendship, Commerce, and
Navigation Treaty between the R.O.C. and the U.S., the works of U.S. nationals
are also granted copyright upon completion. Other foreigners must register their
copyrights with the Copyright Committee of the Ministry of the Interior ("MOI")
in order to receive protection. In order to qualify for copyright registration,
the foreign copyright owners must meet one of the following requirements:
* Their works must have been first published in Taiwan prior to its publication
  in other countries.
* They must be a national of a state which, in accordance with the state's treaties,
  laws, regulations, or customs, grants works created by Taiwan nationals equivalent
  rights to those if its own nationals. (According to the MOI, the countries
  currently meeting this requirement are Spain, Britain, and the U.S.)

> > How about that ?
>
> Well, accepting your completely inaccurate premise for a moment...
>
> You're offering me all the knowledge of the world, freely and legally
> available to everyone with internet access, modulo their own countries
> censorship laws (and capabilities)?
>
> I would consider that an insanely great idea.
> Really, completely, astoundingly insanely great.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Now, suppose there was a place facts could not be copyrighted, (but
> expressions of fact could) but where photographs of factual events
> could not be copyrighted, or could be freely used in reportage.
>
> We'd be able to create a free encyclopedia into which all the knowledge of the
> world could be poured without any constraint, and illustrate historical events
> with photographs, where appropriate.
>
> I would consider that an insanely great idea, too.
>
> And to, a reasonable approximation, it exists.
> It's called the USA, with the "Fair Use" provision.
>
> Now, why are you against that?

Plain wonderful, till you want to distribute it in Europe. Or sell it printed.
Or use it commercially. Or when the owners of the copyrights decide your use
isn't very fair. Or ...

Come on people, if you want non-free stuff, you have all the non-free websites
and the P2P. They even have MS Windows sources there. Wikipedia won't lose much
just because it'd have a couple fewer images, but the point of Wikipedia isn't
to make it as good as possible, but to make it both good and free.


from_name: Optim

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Let's separate user and talkpage databases from
	article database

body:
Summary: Proposal to have separate databases for
userpages, talkpages and articles.

Hello,

I think it would be a good idea to have separate
databases (or downloadable files) for userpages,
talkpages and articles.

Many Wikipedia mirrors copy userpages and
talkpages. I don't like that. It doesn't help to
protect the privacy of Wikipedians.

Having separate databases (or downloadable files)
will help the people who mirror our content to
copy just what they really want (the articles)
and not userpages and talkpages, which may
contain information some Wikipedians (like me)
would prefer be available only on servers
controlled by Wikimedia Foundation.

Please comment, support, oppose, criticise and
inform us about your opinion.

Thank you.

--Optim

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools


body:
On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

> "Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:
>
> > We should make it as good as possible within as wide a legal framework as
> > possible.
>
> I'm on the side of [efficiency]
>
> "Fair Use" images
> i)  Make articles better
> ii) Make it harder for future non-educational projects to exploit
>     the "codebase"
>
> IMHO, (i) is an enormous upside, (ii) is a small downside, especially
> considering that these projects
> a) don't actually exist yet
>    (and making sacrifices to solve non-existent problems is dumb)
> b) are already fettered by the many other constraints of the GFDL
>    (i.e. authorship credits, link-backs)
>
> Now, we can be pragmatists, and work toward a really, really good
> encyclopedia, or we can be dogmatists, and strive toward some abstractly
> pre-defined definition of "freedom."

I'm sorry you reacted to my earlier posting as a strawman argument. I can
understand how it might have been interpreted that way, but I think it's
unnecessary to respond "in kind".

First, you phrase ii) in a way that makes it appear the only danger would be
that "non-educational" (implying: bad) projects would "exploit" (very bad)
Wikipedia. We certainly don't have much sympathy for non-educational
exploiters!

Then you go on to imply that calculating with risks is "dumb", and that there
is some inherent incompatiblity between "good" and "free" here.

Let's drop the footwork. I'll stick to the chase.

Now - there's a "iii)" here too: In many countries outside the USA, _any_
project, not just non-educational projects, would be dissallowed to use (not
"exploit") Wikipedia material.

We're protected from exploitation well enough by the GFDL's copyleft.

"Pragmatism" versus "dogmatism" is in more neutral terms "efficiency" versus
"ethics".  I don't think Wikipedia really needs that extra few percent of
efficiency - we're steamrolling everything there is already.

-- Daniel


body:
On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

> > > Wikipedia isn't hosted in an island state.
> > > This is a thoroughly idiotic, strawman argument.
> >
> > No, it's an "reductio ad absurdum" argument.
>
> Doing something illegal (copying encyclopedias) is not any kind of
> reduction of entirely legal actions.

Fair use is illegal in many large countries outside the US.

Copying encyclopedias is legal on some island states.

> > And it's not idiotic.

> I beg to differ, for the reason stated above.

I'm sorry, but my argument is valid, if a bit too pointed.

-- Daniel


body:
On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

> Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:
>
> > > Now, why are you against that?
> >
> > Plain wonderful, till you want to distribute it in Europe. Or sell it
> > printed.  Or use it commercially.
>
> I don't care a single jot about any of those uses.
> I want to help make a free (small "f") encyclopedia

As I understand it, creating a Free (capital "F") encyclopedia is an explicitly
stated goal of Wikipedia. May I suggest a fork?

-- Daniel


from_name: Robert Michel

body:
Salve!

Am Donnerstag, 19. Februar 2004 16:50 schrieb Jimmy Wales:
> The moral argument is the one that matters.  Should we make use of
> materials that are available only to us because of our special
> circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?
>
> I think we all know what Richard Stallman would say, and I for one
> will agree with him completely.

You know the spirit of GNU, but you don`t know what he would say.

At the moments the discussions of wikipianer is narrow minded:
"Are I`m allowed to copy this without asking someone" instead of
starting a discussion "How can you motivate Copyrights owner to contribute one
impressfull picture to the Wikipedia"?

So I would please Richard Stallman to tell us:
"You are only asking for free resources - come on guys start to learn to
programm your one code (make the photos yourself) AND learn the soft skill to
motivate people to support your project and share a view of their personal
pictures."

BTW, when we discuss the problem with Richard, I would not be surpriced when
we would get another licence, the GNU-FPL (Free Picture Licence). I`m in
favor for hash codes and fingerprints like PGP to include all important
informations insied this signd file - GNU-FDL is not perferct for pictures.

But back to motivate you to think about how to learn the soft skill for asking
for contribution. I have worked on one artikel about one new lonly island in
Germany [[de:Kachelotplate]] and I found two webpages with an aerial photo of
this island and I have asked both to get one picture for the use with
GNU-FDL. The one wepage was a public authority and they excuse that they
haven`t the right for this picture, but they forwarded my mail to the
photographer.

Today, 10 days later I got a call form a very kind airman who had make this
pictures and he was impressed by our articels about aviation - he offerd a
full CD with many pictures of this island and he lifes on another island and
he got many ideas who to ask for more contribution for artikles and pictures
***g***

So know I`m sure we will have more than one aerial photos from only one
island.

I agree that asking people for contribute, support or join the wikipeadia
needs time - but in this case it was the work of 1h and we have now new
friends.
If you don`t ask, you can save 1h but some people you may make angry and you
will never have a chance again to win them as friend for our project.

==Advertisement for NGOs/GOs==
See [[de:Sable Island]] - for this artikle of an island befor the cost of
canada I found a picture made by NASA from the space shutel. There condition
to use is:

 For astronaut photography of Earth accessed through this website, please
state "Image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA
Johnson Space Center." We recommend that the caption for any photograph
published include the unique photo number (Mission-Roll-Frame), and our
website (http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov) so that others can locate or obtain copies
when needed. We always appreciate notification of beneficial uses of
astronaut photography of Earth-information on your applications. This will
help us continue to maintain these services for the public. Send e-mail to
earthweb at jsc.nasa.gov.

- Does this be conform with GNU-FDL?
- What does you think about the legend under the picture in the artikel

This picture is IMHO a good exampel for a picture description:
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Bild:Sable_Island_NASA_300x301_from_EFS_highres_STS059_STS059-216-79.jpg
(I will ask NASA for the missing information WHO has made this picture *g*)

So I think you got my point:

It?s not only the question what picture is copy free,
its more the question, how do I ask blandest and friendly to get a GNU-FDL
conform contribution. ;)

And I`m sure to get all picures I want for both island articles during this
year - WITH GNU-FDL!

> If that means less images for now, then it means less images for now.
> It also means that we have a very strong incentive to develop free
> alternatives.
Past & Copy:
- This can everybody do :( - this will make wikipedia not special
- Important picture informations will not be used
- This will not find new wikipianer
- And will bring us in danger of bad headlines and losing these pictures in
future, or for some countries....

Greetings
rob

See also:
Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright  (Robert Michel,  Thu Feb 19 12:36:19
2004)

 on ahave ask to

contribute

I will stress that concentrating on existing pictures and existing licences
are a little narrow minded.

 The Wikimedia Foundation should be a
> beacon of what is possible with copyright freedom, and we should not
> allow anyone to ever point at our work and say "Yeah, they talk the
> big talk about free licensing, but what would their site be without
> all those proprietary licensed images and fair use exceptions?"
>
> If that means less images for now, then it means less images for now.
> It also means that we have a very strong incentive to develop free
> alternatives.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


references:
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	<r5in07f7ygv.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219175650.GA9571@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ieksr7xsu.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219182236.GA9663@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ioerv6i90.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>

body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 06:23:23PM +0000, Gareth Owen wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:
>
> > > Now, why are you against that?
> >
> > Plain wonderful, till you want to distribute it in Europe. Or sell it
> > printed.  Or use it commercially.
>
> I don't care a single jot about any of those uses.
> I want to help make a free (small "f") encyclopedia

Wikipedia was meant to be *Free* (capital "F") encyclopedia,
and a lot of people want it that way. It's fine if you don't care
about that, but what you are proposing is to actively work against
that goal, by containating Free content with the non-free.

If you can't live with Wikipedia being Free, find another project.

> > Come on people, if you want non-free stuff,
> > you have all the non-free websites and the P2P.
> > They even have MS Windows sources there.
>
> Why do you continue to conflate Fair Use and illegality?
> (Tom asked, rhetorically)

In Europe there isn't much difference.


references:
<20040219184210.J50567-100000@unity.copyleft.no>
	<r5in07f7ygv.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219175650.GA9571@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ieksr7xsu.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219182236.GA9663@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ioerv6i90.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219184852.GA9772@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5i7jyi7uf5.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219193246.GA10067@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:

> So let's create nonfree.wikipedia.org

Create nonfree.en.wikipedia.org and free.en.wikipedia.org (only fair. This
goes for other languages as well) Then, en.wikipedia.org (or whichever
language) contains all the non-contentious articles (in the sense of
containing Fair Use materials). Contentious articles merely contain the text

#FREEDIRECT [[Article name]]

and the user is then served with the page from one of free. / nonfree.
according to a user preference, stored in a cookie[0], and when the French
block nonfree[1], they can still read the other version...

And if we get a takedown notice for a given image, take it down.
We're no better off if we take them all down now.

> Wikipedia is NOT an US project.

I didn't say that it was.  I said it was US based.  Which it evidently is.

[0] The default will be nonfree.wikipedia.org, naturally.
(based on the completely-made-up-statistic that the number of users
 [as opposed to contributors] who care deeply and passionately about
 big-F-Freedom are outnumbered by those of us who couldn't give a toss)

[1] I find it hilarious that it was suggested (seemingly with a straight face)
 that major European governments would attempt to censor their internet over
 Fair Use violations, and that we should act now to address this concern.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Argument against use of fair use images.

body:
Hi.

There's another argument I've forgotten to mention:

It may well be that "fair use" is protected in the USA, but that doesn't mean
that some big nasty company can't sue the project. Many companies in the USA
use the legal system as a blunt weapon, without caring much whether they'll
eventually win or lose any given fight.

They'll have more money than we'll do, and they could take it as far as they
wanted.

Of course, in most cases like this we could simply remove the relevant images.
But that could be more of a problem for projects (educational, in the US) who
have printed or made CD copies of Wikipedia.

Also, we could be exposed to companies with an agenda, such as puppets for
encyclopedia publishers. Who knows, maybe the pure audacity of Wikipedia as a
source of Free information will piss of some of the bigger media conglomerates.

I say this counts in favour of staying away from non-free material, free use or
not.

-- Daniel


body:
Wikipedia mirrors are not editable by the author.
In Wikipedia, If I publish something and I change
opinion, I just point my mouse to the "Edit" link
and I change it. But you cannot do that on a
mirror. Thus, the author losts control over his
userpage.

--Optim

--- Sascha Noyes <sascha at pantropy.net> wrote:
> I agree that this would be useful. I must
> however remind you that this has
> nothing to do with privacy. If you publish
> something on your user page it is
> _published_. Which means that it is not
> private.
>
> Best,
> Sascha Noyes
>
> On Thursday 19 February 2004 10:29 pm, Optim
> wrote:
> > Summary: Proposal to have separate databases
> for
> > userpages, talkpages and articles.
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I think it would be a good idea to have
> separate
> > databases (or downloadable files) for
> userpages,
> > talkpages and articles.
> >
> > Many Wikipedia mirrors copy userpages and
> > talkpages. I don't like that. It doesn't help
> to
> > protect the privacy of Wikipedians.
> >
> > Having separate databases (or downloadable
> files)
> > will help the people who mirror our content
> to
> > copy just what they really want (the
> articles)
> > and not userpages and talkpages, which may
> > contain information some Wikipedians (like
> me)
> > would prefer be available only on servers
> > controlled by Wikimedia Foundation.
> >
> > Please comment, support, oppose, criticise
> and
> > inform us about your opinion.
> >
> > Thank you.
> >
> > --Optim
>
> --
> Encryption key available from
> http://www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: Caroline Ford

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Fwd: Re: [WikiEN-l] Some images need to be
	deleted...]

body:
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From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Some images need to be deleted...
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 07:07:34 -0800
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Url: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20040219/e6d4d49e/attachment.eml


body:
oh sorry! I said "Thus, the author losts control
over his userpage." while I should write "Thus,
the author losts control over his/her userpage."
:/

Damn, I feel shame. I haven't written in sexist
language for a long time, and now I just did that
:(  I can't believe I forgot one of my most basic
rules of writing. Next time better remember to
re-read my msg before clicking "Send"! :)

Also need to say thank you for replying and
agreeing with my proposal.

--- Optim <optim81 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Wikipedia mirrors are not editable by the
> author.
> In Wikipedia, If I publish something and I
> change
> opinion, I just point my mouse to the "Edit"
> link
> and I change it. But you cannot do that on a
> mirror. Thus, the author losts control over his
> userpage.
>
> --Optim
>
>
> --- Sascha Noyes <sascha at pantropy.net> wrote:
> > I agree that this would be useful. I must
> > however remind you that this has
> > nothing to do with privacy. If you publish
> > something on your user page it is
> > _published_. Which means that it is not
> > private.
> >
> > Best,
> > Sascha Noyes
> >
> > On Thursday 19 February 2004 10:29 pm, Optim
> > wrote:
> > > Summary: Proposal to have separate
> databases
> > for
> > > userpages, talkpages and articles.
> > >
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I think it would be a good idea to have
> > separate
> > > databases (or downloadable files) for
> > userpages,
> > > talkpages and articles.
> > >
> > > Many Wikipedia mirrors copy userpages and
> > > talkpages. I don't like that. It doesn't
> help
> > to
> > > protect the privacy of Wikipedians.
> > >
> > > Having separate databases (or downloadable
> > files)
> > > will help the people who mirror our content
> > to
> > > copy just what they really want (the
> > articles)
> > > and not userpages and talkpages, which may
> > > contain information some Wikipedians (like
> > me)
> > > would prefer be available only on servers
> > > controlled by Wikimedia Foundation.
> > >
> > > Please comment, support, oppose, criticise
> > and
> > > inform us about your opinion.
> > >
> > > Thank you.
> > >
> > > --Optim
> >
> > --
> > Encryption key available from
> > http://www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc
> >
> _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
> __________________________________
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from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: What would Richard Stallman say?

body:
Not everyone on Wikipedia knows who Richard Stallman is, or cares what
he would say. The moral argument has appeal, but alone it only works if
Jimbo decides the issue by fiat. I presume he asks the question, though,
because he wants some semblance of consensus before making his executive
decision.

I hesitate to rely on moral arguments in a NPOV world. How about a
policy argument, the question being, what is best for Wikipedia? Can we
really use non-GFDL images online, and should we? Jimbo says we can,
based on section 7 of the GFDL, but that we shouldn't, because it
doesn't follow the spirit of the GFDL. Others say we should, because it
allows us to create a better encyclopedia. I say we shouldn't, because
it's bad for the project, and might end up violating the GFDL as well.

I know that we carefully say that "All text is available under the terms
of the GNU Free Documentation License", without saying anything about
the images. But we need to look at a bigger picture than just a
computer-based project. Section 7 applies "if the copyright resulting
from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the
compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit." Fine and
dandy on a computer, where you can claim that the text and the images
are separate files.

But the GFDL applies "in any medium". The Wikimedia Foundation has
ambitions to release Wikipedia in print form. The end of this year has
been suggested as a goal. Do we still claim then that an image is a
separate document from an article? And anyway, we can't limit the rights
of our users to copy Wikipedia articles into print form. But if I use my
printer to print out any article with an image in it, the image prints
out with the text. Voila, I may have infringed someone's copyright! And
by presenting images this way, instead of merely linking to separate
image pages, Wikipedia is limiting my right to copy GFDL text.
Therefore, Wikipedia arguably is not complying with section 7 of the GFDL.

I find it highly disingenuous to rely on an argument that images are
separate from the articles they appear in. Jimbo thinks we're okay
license-wise, but when you get this far, both of us are relying on
technicalities. The law, and legal interpretation, sometimes abandons
such positions, even when they are technically correct. I don't think we
can count on a legally untested license to protect us forever if we
continue to use non-GFDL images. Somebody downstream will use images
without permission, claim the use is licensed, and when they get sued,
Wikipedia will get sued too for having licensed the unauthorized use.

On the other hand, if we stick to images that qualify for GFDL, we don't
need boxes for people to check every time they upload an image. We don't
have to ask users to engage in amateur legal analysis, an unreliable way
to classify our images by copyright status, just in case we might have
to weed out certain classifications later. We can just tell people that
anything you upload has to be free. Unless it's totally free (i.e. in
the public domain), it has to be under a free-content license. Simpler,
and much better in the long run.

--Michael Snow


body:
On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

>> In many countries outside the USA, _any_ project, not just non-educational
>> projects, would be dissallowed to use (not "exploit") Wikipedia material.

> You appear to greatly misunderstand the nature of the World Wide Web.
> To supply the world, we need only publish in the US.

> We need not concern ourselves with what whether the information may be
> published in Spain, Wales or Finland any more than we concern ourselves with
> whether it may be published in North Korea.

I think this is an intolerable position, and I also think it's against
Wikipedia's goals and policies.

As far as I understand, Wikipedia is supposed to create a free encyclopedia,
not simply be specific web site.

Also, the argument that we need only adhere to US laws if we want to supply the
world is false. It's entirely conceivable that a large country (say France)
would make it illegal to access Wikipedia for its citizens because of the
copyright violations it represented (under French law). I'm sure a lot of
corporations would be happy to lobby governments for such actions.

-- Daniel


body:
On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

> > Fair use is illegal in many large countries outside the US.
>
> But the Wikipedia servers are not in any of those countries,
> and so this is completely irrelevant.
>
> Are we to scour the world for the most strict censorship laws
> in order to comply with those as well?
>
> That won't leave much of an encyclopedia.

That's a valid argument, and my answer is that we stop where copyright laws end
and cencorship laws start. It's pretty simple: If someone didn't explicitly
create something for WIkipedia, explicitly allow us to use it, or explicitly
make it public domain - then we don't use it.

Or in easier terms: We post whatever we make ourselves.

-- Daniel


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Some images need to be deleted...

body:
Secretlondon and Morwen did a wonderful job trying to get an idea of the
problem. I doubt whether they got a truly representative sample of
images on Wikipedia, nor did they claim to, but obviously we have some
that don't belong.

And Secretlondon is also doing great work to try and get permission for
some of the images we have a hard time finding...

Caroline Ford wrote:

>
>
>>Even today I did more - I have had contact with the press offices of the
>>two main opposition parties in the UK and they have both given wikipedia
>>permission to use images of their leading politicians. I presume that
>>you'd want these deleted too.
>>
Not yet. If everything on Wikipedia is GFDL, can we make an argument
that people who give permission to Wikipedia are implicitly agreeing to
GFDL, because that's the only kind of use we have? I think we want to do
our best to save the stuff we have some kind of permission for, before
deciding that permission is worthless.

Also, we need a truce on deleting images until we have a better
consensus. Any deletions need to follow our usual procedures.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Yann Forget

body:
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Hi,

Le Thursday 19 February 2004 19:55, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen a ?crit :
>
> There's another argument I've forgotten to mention:
>
> It may well be that "fair use" is protected in the USA, but that doesn't
> mean that some big nasty company can't sue the project. Many companies in
> the USA use the legal system as a blunt weapon, without caring much whether
> they'll eventually win or lose any given fight.

They do not need fair use for that. They can use many other arguments.
So this is a poor argument against fair use.

Yann

- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
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body:
On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

> > It's entirely conceivable that a large country (say France) would make it
> > illegal to access Wikipedia for its citizens
>
> A large country has.  China's great firewall blocks much of wikipedia.
> We *could* amend it so that its acceptable to the Chinese government.
> We *could* amend it so that its acceptable to the French government.
>
> Personally, I'm not in favour of that.

This is confusing two issues. Censorship and copyright. I agree that we
shouldn't adhere to Chinese censorship laws. But staying legal in an open
democracy such as France is something else.

-- Daniel


references:
<20040219184210.J50567-100000@unity.copyleft.no>
	<r5in07f7ygv.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219175650.GA9571@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ieksr7xsu.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219182236.GA9663@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ioerv6i90.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219184852.GA9772@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5i7jyi7uf5.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>

body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 07:15:10PM +0000, Gareth Owen wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:
> > Wikipedia was meant to be *Free* (capital "F") encyclopedia, and a lot of
> > people want it that way.
>
> The initial decisions were made before anyone could possibly be aware of the
> repercussions.  One such decision was the adoption of the GFDL, a license
> designed for software documentation (that I consider horribly flawed for
> pretty much anything else).
>
> Now, we can adapt, and say
>     "All the original content is GFDL, but as an educational project
>      we're going to illustrate it with images under the Fair Use provision
>      (as provided by US laws), because we can legally do so and it makes the
>      product better"
>
> or we can say
>     "Everything on *.wikipedia.org must be GFDL licensed,"
>
> Or, as others here have noted, we can have our cake and eat it.
> Keep the Fair Use photos on the US servers (good product) but mark
> non-Free images and automagically maintain separate tarballs of Free and
> non-Free stuff.  Like Debian did for years and years...
> [/aside]

In Debian there is very clear separation between free and non-free software.
The free software can not rely in any way on non-free (except for the
contrib stuff). This solution is fine. So let's create nonfree.wikipedia.org,
where people can upload anything they want, and keep normal Wikipedia completely free.

> > > Why do you continue to conflate Fair Use and illegality?
> >
> > In Europe there isn't much difference.
>
> Given this is a US based project, that sentence has the double
> distinction of both completely untrue and utterly irrelevant.

Wikipedia is NOT an US project. It's international project meant to be
useful worldwide. It's really irrelevant where the servers are.


body:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Yann Forget wrote:

> Le Thursday 19 February 2004 19:55, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen a ?crit :

> > It may well be that "fair use" is protected in the USA, but that doesn't
> > mean that some big nasty company can't sue the project. Many companies in
> > the USA use the legal system as a blunt weapon, without caring much whether
> > they'll eventually win or lose any given fight.

> They do not need fair use for that. They can use many other arguments.
> So this is a poor argument against fair use.

I agree this argument is weaker than the others in favour of avoiding fair use
images.

Nevertheless: Using images that typically belong to just the kind of people
we're going to be pissing of the most sets us up particularly well for attacks
from them.

For most other arguments (say libel), we could deny that that was the case.

Here, we won't be able to deny that we used somebody else's copyrighted work -
just that our interpretation of the law makes it ok to do so.

To put it in words that are usually unfamiliar to me: We don't want to be
dogmatists. We don't want to fight for the right to use these images. We want
to be pragmatists, which means to focus on creating the encyclopedia.

-- Daniel


body:
--- Sascha Noyes <sascha at pantropy.net> wrote:
> Yes, I agree. I was just clarifying that this
> isn't related to privacy.
>
> Best,
> Sascha Noyes

You are right and I am thankful for your
comments. Just to add that my idea is that it
just helps privacy indirectly. Some person may be
more than willing to write in public some
information about himself/herself if he/she does
not expect people to begin redistributing this
information all over the Internet, making it more
and more public.

As an example: I may be happy to announce in
Wikipedia that I don't eat meat nor fish (so I am
a vegetarian). I may do that because I may want
to meet other Wikipedians with the same
preferences etc. There may be dome people that I
wouldn't like to know what I eat and what I don't
eat, for example I would prefer not to let my
friends, family etc know this info. I don't
expect them to be very interested in Wikipedia or
know how to use it. The probability of someone
finding this info is low enough that I consider
it safe to publish such info because I have some
"partial privacy" (the info is public, but I know
few people can or are willing to access it, as
opposed to "total privacy" where many people can
access the info so I prefer not to publish it at
all). However, as Wikipedia is becoming more and
more common, many sites start mirroring its
content, including user pages. In this case, the
probability of someone finding info on me that I
don't want him/her know is becoming higher. This
is just a small simple example about a topic
which is not so important. Hope this helps you to
understand my definition of "relative privacy".

Thus, privacy does not only mean "zero
probability of undesirable information
disclosure". If that probability is low enough by
my standards, I may decide to publish more info
on Wikipedia about me and socialise more.
However, when this probability becomes higher, I
may start feeling uncomfortable and be forced
switch to "total privacy". Especially when other
people are mirroring userpages (and talkpages!).

By having separate downloadable files for
articles and userpages/talkpages, we give the
ability to downloaders get only the material they
are really interested in: The articles. I see no
reason why somebody would want to download all
userpages and talkpages, except if he/she is
interested to research how Wikipedians
communicate with each other etc. In reality I
don't see any need to have userpages and
talkpages downloadable, so such downloadable
files could not exist at all.

We could just have a downloadable file for
Articles and another one for the whole database
(Articles+Userpages+Talkpages). Actually I just
want to make sure that "accidental"
copying/downloading/redistribution of userpages
and talkpages will not happen again.

--Optim

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body:
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Le Thursday 19 February 2004 20:34, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen a ?crit :

> To put it in words that are usually unfamiliar to me: We don't want to be
> dogmatists. We don't want to fight for the right to use these images. We
> want to be pragmatists, which means to focus on creating the encyclopedia.
>
> -- Daniel

But that's exactly what I say!
Don't be dogmatist. Accept fair use when we can use it and we can't get a free
image.

Actually, this whole discussion is quite rhetoric, as most of the images in
Wikipedia (at least en:, but also fr:, for what I know) are not properly
labelled. I think many of them are probably public domain or free but we
can't say because of missing information. So first, we should properly label
the images, and then come back to this discussion with the list of images
under fair use. That's would be pragmatist!

Yann

- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
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list: wikien-l

from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister's legal threat

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>The course of action I recommend to everyone is to leave a crystal
>clean paper trail so that the arbitration committee can ban this guy
>with a clean conscience if he misbehaves.
>
>His "lawyer" contacted me (from France, so I'm not really worried
>about it), but made no specific legal threats other than the typical
>lawyerly hints and tone.
>
>It's very important, as a matter of justice and transparency, that we
>not ban Irismeister for behavior that others commit against him.  This
>is one of the biggest reasons why Usenet-style flaming is so bad
>around here -- it deprives us of one of the cleanest reasons we have
>for getting rid of bad apples.
>
>In a real anarchy like Usenet, where getting someone else kicked out
>is impossible, the only known solution to jerks is to yell at them in
>the hopes that they get some sense.  (This solution doesn't work at
>all, but that doesn't keep people from trying it.)  Around here, the
>solution is to greet them with respect, love, and sincere attempts to
>help them achieve whatever rational goals they may have.  And this
>leaves us a nice clean and simple paper trail for banning if they just
>can't behave.
>
>
While it's not the approach I advocate, from a purely legal standpoint I
don't see how he has a leg to stand on.  The Wikimedia Foundation has no
legal obligation to let all viewpoints be heard, and is permitted to be
explicitly anti-iridology if it so desired.  We ought not to be biased
on any particular matter (as far as being unbiased is possible), but
we're *legally permitted* to be.  We can even ban people because we
don't like the word "iridology", because it makes my head hurt trying to
pronounce it.  Or we can ban people because having a name ending in
"idology" irritates us.  Simply put, we don't *need* a clean paper-trail
to ban anyone, legally speaking.  "The Wikimedia Foundation does not
like User:Iridology, and no longer chooses to permit him to publish his
material on our website" is a good enough reason.

All, again, legally speaking.  Obviously we want a much different
process for our own satisfaction.  But not because it's required by any law.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Special Permission" flag, or not?

body:
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:

>If the only way we can illustrate a topic is by using such images (or
>other media), then I think we should do so.  Provided we have a
>mechanism by which reusers of our content can avoid downloading them,
>it doesn't seem to be a problem.  I do, however, recommend we accept
>their use only if it is the only way to provide such images for an
>article.
>
>
I don't like this idea, because it makes the Wikipedia website seem like
the end product we're trying to produce, which in my view it is not.
We're trying to produce a free encyclopedia, and one way it will be
published is on wikipedia.org.  If an image is only allowed to be
published by us, it is not part of the free encyclopedia, but an
addition to the free encyclopedia only available on one specific website.

Using such images will also tend to discourage the creation or location
of actually free images.

-Mark


body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
>>> There is clearly no consensus to delete images we have permission to
>>> use.
>>>
>>
>> But we obviously don't. I can't legally print it with the article and
>> sell it,
>> so it's not acceptable.
>>
> What makes you so sure about that? Are you a copyright expert, or have
> you
> gotten a statement to that effect from a copyright expert?

I'm not a lawyer, but that interpretation seems consistent with the "do
fair use images violate the GFDL?" discussion.  Fair use images, it
appears, do not in fact violate the GFDL, because they're a special case
of conditionally-public-domain material, so the GFDL doesn't apply,
because copyright law does not apply.  But with special-permission
images, copyright law *does* apply.  And the GFDL explicitly prohibits
editing a GFDL work by inserting non-GFDL'd components.

There is the aggregation defense that has been alluded to, but I think
inserting an image in-line in an article is clearly making it part of
the article as one work, not merely distributing it on the same medium.
If all the images were on separate pages (as in an appendix, perhaps),
then that'd be another matter.

So, in my non-legal opinion, I don't think we can legally include
special-permission images in GFDL'd articles, as doing so is a violation
of the GFDL's "all edits must also be GFDL'd" requirement.

(Again, fair use and public domain images excepted.)

-Mark


body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 10:31:51PM +0000, Caroline Ford wrote:
>
>
>>And you should be ashamed by abusing sysop rights by deleting an image
>>without discussion.
>>
>>
>
>I'm going to use sysops powers as much as I see fit in copyright and
>vandalism related matters.
>
>
As far as copyright-related matters go, please use [[Wikipedia:Possible
copyright infringements]] instead of instant deletion.  This is our
established mechanism for even apparently-obvious copyright violations
(like copying/pasting from websites), and seems to work fairly well.
The idea is that we get several opinions, and give the original user a
chance to say "hey guys I'm the author and I GFDL it" on the occasions
when we mistakenly assume something is a copyright violation.

-Mark


body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>The point of fair use is that '''certain use''' is fair, not arbitrary use -
>and the copyright still applies. And this effectively restricts what can be
>legally done with a work created using both GFDL and fair use material,
>and thus breaks the GFDL.
>
>So we need to separate nonfree content somewhere else, and then we can claim
>it's mere aggregation.
>
>
This was the argument I had initially advanced (on meta:Do fair use
images violate the GFDL?), but I no longer am convinced it's true.  Fair
use seems to be a very oddly-constructed case in which it's difficult to
tell *exactly* what applies, but it appears to be the case that
copyright law simply doesn't apply at all to fair use situations.  Since
the GFDL relies on copyright law, it thus can't really have anything to
say about fair use.  For example, short quotations of literature are
fair use.  Presumably the GFDL does not intend to prohibit any GFDL'd
works from including short quotations from literature?  Since afaik fair
use is fair use, if that's permitted, then fair use images generally
must also be permitted.

I do agree that some fair use images violate the spirit of the GFDL, and
should be discouraged.  For example, if something is only barely fair
use for us, and only because we're a non-profit organization with an
educational mission, that has the effect of making the document non-free
for all practical purposes, unless the images are stripped out, while
the entire point of the GFDL was to make the document free for all
purposes.  But things like short quotations from literature, or very
famous news photographs, and so on, that would be fair use for most of
our users, seem like they should be okay.

-Mark


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
nonfree.wikipedia.org (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] What would Richard
	Stallman say?)

body:
On Feb 19, 2004, at 21:08, Delirium wrote:
> There is the aggregation defense that has been alluded to, but I think
> inserting an image in-line in an article is clearly making it part of
> the article as one work, not merely distributing it on the same
> medium.  If all the images were on separate pages (as in an appendix,
> perhaps), then that'd be another matter.

On that note, a question for the folks who aren't willing to give up
"fair use images": would an 'appendix' system be acceptable to you?

What I'm envisioning is an associated site to which non-PD non-GFDL
but-probably-ok-under-fair-use-for-a-non-profit-encyclopedia could be
uploaded and linked _from there_ to Wikipedia article names. The page
display on *.wikipedia.org could see when there's an associated page
and include a more or less prominent link to the photo/media page. (For
those familiar with Ward's Wiki, this would be similar to how
SisterSites links work.)

To summarize:
* images which can only be justified as "fair use" (for some uses, in
the US only) would not be uploaded to Wikipedia itself, embedded in
Wikipedia articles, or included in basic Wikipedia page/media dumps
* but those images could be made available through Wikimedia's sites
(for acceptably fair use, in the US) and hyperlinked to Wikipedia
articles (not inline)
* redistributors who determined the images were ok could still take them
* redistributors who might not be able to use them don't have to mess
with it

Would this be acceptable from legal, moral, and other standpoints?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 01:54:55PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>
>>Jimbo wrote:
>>
>>
>>>...
>>>If that means less images for now, then it means less images
>>>for now. It also means that we have a very strong incentive
>>>to develop free alternatives.
>>>
>>>
>>No it means that many things will *never* have images. For example, Dolly the
>>Sheep is dead. The only images of her are either from the news media or from
>>the Roslin Institute. Therefore I used the images from the Roslin Institute.
>>The license on those images states that they can be freely used in a
>>noncommercial setting so long as credit is given. I have done that.
>>
>>
>
>Fair use is one thing but this has gone way too far.
>Image deleted.
>
>And you lied when submitting that it is a free image.
>You should at least feel ashamed of what you have done.
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
And you should be ashamed by abusing sysop rights by deleting an image
without discussion. There is clearly no consensus to delete images we
have permission to use.

I don't understand why you think this is worse than fair use - this
image is used entirely legally, unlike a lot of "fair use" images. It
would also probably be illegal for a UK contributor to upload it under
American fair use law.

I notice that it was quickly restored, and messages left on your talk
page asking you to desist.

Caroline / Secretlondon


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

body:
Nathan Russell wrote:

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> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> | It has been called to my attention that the concept of "fair use" may
> | be significantly more restricted in the UK than in the US, to the
> | point that most of what is fair use in the US may not be in the UK.
> |
> | If that's true, then we need to radically reassess our policy on fair
> | use images, likely restricting or even eliminating them entirely, even
> | though everything we're doing on our site is totally valid for us, we
> | need to be extremely sensitive to the needs of people who might seek
> | to reuse our content.
> |
> | --Jimbo
>
> Jimbo, to what extent do we need to respect the policies of other
> nations, and which other nations?  No offense is meant to the many UK
> folks on this list, but I would not want wikipedia to have to remove all
> content that the Chinese or Saudi government objected to.
>
> Nathan
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> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
Fair use is only US. Britain is hardly Saudi Arabia or Noth Korea.

Fair dealing is very different.

I think tagging images with precise details of usage is the way forward.
One problem with only allowing public domain images is that only the US
government puts its images in the public domain. So only US articles
will be properly illustrated.

To be honest, I'd rather people were concentrating on unlabelled images.
We can then decide whether we want to delete all the non-US images that
are used with permission as that is the only way to use them. From this
side of the Atlantic US fair use images are worse than ones we are
legally allowed to use.

We need to go on an image tagging drive. And then have the discussion ON
THE WIKI so that the other 99% of users and contributors are aware of
the debate. Even most adminsitrators don't contribute to the mailing lists.


body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 01:54:55PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Jimbo wrote:
> >...
> >If that means less images for now, then it means less images
> >for now. It also means that we have a very strong incentive
> >to develop free alternatives.
>
> No it means that many things will *never* have images. For example, Dolly the
> Sheep is dead. The only images of her are either from the news media or from
> the Roslin Institute. Therefore I used the images from the Roslin Institute.
> The license on those images states that they can be freely used in a
> noncommercial setting so long as credit is given. I have done that.

Fair use is one thing but this has gone way too far.
Image deleted.

And you lied when submitting that it is a free image.
You should at least feel ashamed of what you have done.


body:
Delirium wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> Jimmy-
>>
>>
>>> The moral argument is the one that matters.  Should we make use of
>>> materials that are available only to us because of our special
>>> circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?
>>>
>>
>>
>> We should strike a reasonable balance, and that means that images
>> which  are clearly unobtainable under a free license but historically
>> important  works should be used as fair use. Copyright law is
>> restrictive enough as  it is, it would be a big mistake not to
>> exploit the few exemptions it  grants us, under the guise of being
>> "more free". In fact, by rejecting  fair use, we effectively endorse
>> restrictive copyright doctrines.
>>
>>
> FWIW, I vaguely agree with both Jimbo and Erik on this point.  I
> strongly prefer Free images wherever possible, but I don't think we
> should entirely refrain from using fair use images.
>
> I would, however, support us doing so very carefully, and only when
> necessary.  Furthermore, I think we should restrict our fair use
> images to fairly unambiguous cases of fair use, at least informally.
> A very famous photograph of an event from WW2, for example, is pretty
> clear fair use for almost all users.
>
> Images licensed "for Wikipedia use only" or "for non-commercial use
> only" are another matter, and possibly even GFDL-incompatible---and at
> the very least something I don't like.
>
> So, to summarize, my position is:
> * Strongly prefer GFDL or public domain images
> * Allow fair use images in cases where GFDL or public domain images
> are unavailable, with a strong preference towards clear-cut fair use
> cases that would also be fair use for most reusers of our content
> * Do not accept special-permission images
>
> -Mark
>
I think is debate is very important. What is our ethos?

I, naturally, prefer free images. The problem is that there are very few
of them out there. The main sources of free images are public domain
sources, or contributor photos.

There is a severe shortage of public domain images. Apart from the US
government the only other decent source I have found  is a German public
domain image project.

Contributors can only take photos of things such as places, or objects.
They cannot take pictures of  things that no longer exist, or of famous
people.

It is said (as a cliche) that an image speaks a thousand words. I think
images are very important to the encyclopedia. When I've shown the site
to "normal people" they were much more interested in pages with images,
they were more accessible.

It is almost a debate between purity and making a better encyclopedia.
The US national use of "fair use" is a peripheral debate, although one
that is very important for those without access to fair use.

So what do we do? I prefer tagging of all images, so that fair use
images can be removed by a non-US user. However I am strongly favour of
keeping images used with permission, as these greatly improve the
encylopedia's coverage of non-US topics and people. If we only used PD
images of politicians we would only have US politicians, and images of
national leaders shaking hands with US presidents (from the survey we
did yesterday). This would appear to be a bias, and could also been seen
as POV as a country's relationship with the US is often controversial.

I hope tagging, allowing separation is a compromise. The status quo is
chaos.

Caroline


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Le Thursday 19 February 2004 23:16, Tomasz Wegrzanowski a ?crit :

> > No it means that many things will *never* have images. For example, Dolly
> > the Sheep is dead. The only images of her are either from the news media
> > or from the Roslin Institute. Therefore I used the images from the Roslin
> > Institute. The license on those images states that they can be freely
> > used in a noncommercial setting so long as credit is given. I have done
> > that.
>
> Fair use is one thing but this has gone way too far.
> Image deleted.

This seems alright as fair use to me. And you take bold decisions without
asking others if they agree. Not very nice.

> And you lied when submitting that it is a free image.
> You should at least feel ashamed of what you have done.

And this moral judgement should not appear here.

Yann

- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
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body:
if I understood well, you suggest having a
database of fair use images which can be
hyperlinked from Wikipedia articles but they will
never be inline.

If I understood correctly then I agree! According
to my moral standards this is ok. However I
cannot talk about the law because IANAL.

--Optim

--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Feb 19, 2004, at 21:08, Delirium wrote:
> > There is the aggregation defense that has
> been alluded to, but I think
> > inserting an image in-line in an article is
> clearly making it part of
> > the article as one work, not merely
> distributing it on the same
> > medium.  If all the images were on separate
> pages (as in an appendix,
> > perhaps), then that'd be another matter.
>
> On that note, a question for the folks who
> aren't willing to give up
> "fair use images": would an 'appendix' system
> be acceptable to you?
>
> What I'm envisioning is an associated site to
> which non-PD non-GFDL
>
but-probably-ok-under-fair-use-for-a-non-profit-encyclopedia
> could be
> uploaded and linked _from there_ to Wikipedia
> article names. The page
> display on *.wikipedia.org could see when
> there's an associated page
> and include a more or less prominent link to
> the photo/media page. (For
> those familiar with Ward's Wiki, this would be
> similar to how
> SisterSites links work.)
>
> To summarize:
> * images which can only be justified as "fair
> use" (for some uses, in
> the US only) would not be uploaded to Wikipedia
> itself, embedded in
> Wikipedia articles, or included in basic
> Wikipedia page/media dumps
> * but those images could be made available
> through Wikimedia's sites
> (for acceptably fair use, in the US) and
> hyperlinked to Wikipedia
> articles (not inline)
> * redistributors who determined the images were
> ok could still take them
> * redistributors who might not be able to use
> them don't have to mess
> with it
>
> Would this be acceptable from legal, moral, and
> other standpoints?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>

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from_name: Anthere

body:
Caroline Ford a ?crit:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 01:54:55PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Jimbo wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> ...
>>>> If that means less images for now, then it means less images for
>>>> now. It also means that we have a very strong incentive to develop
>>>> free alternatives.
>>>>
>>>
>>> No it means that many things will *never* have images. For example,
>>> Dolly the
>>> Sheep is dead. The only images of her are either from the news media
>>> or from
>>> the Roslin Institute. Therefore I used the images from the Roslin
>>> Institute.
>>> The license on those images states that they can be freely used in a
>>> noncommercial setting so long as credit is given. I have done that.
>>
>>
>> Fair use is one thing but this has gone way too far.
>> Image deleted.
>>
>> And you lied when submitting that it is a free image.
>> You should at least feel ashamed of what you have done.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>>
>>
> And you should be ashamed by abusing sysop rights by deleting an image
> without discussion. There is clearly no consensus to delete images we
> have permission to use.
>
> I don't understand why you think this is worse than fair use - this
> image is used entirely legally, unlike a lot of "fair use" images. It
> would also probably be illegal for a UK contributor to upload it under
> American fair use law.
>
> I notice that it was quickly restored, and messages left on your talk
> page asking you to desist.
>
> Caroline / Secretlondon

I must have missed a step one day.  I thought image deletion was
permanent. No ? I am always a train late :-)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
Salve Mark,

Am Donnerstag, 19. Februar 2004 23:44 schrieb Delirium:
> Robert Michel wrote:
> >Why so much bureaucracy? When the director of one museum give us verbally
> > the rigth to use this a photo of one modern work of art - what is when
> > his successor do not like us to use this photo with GNU-FDL and he would
> > prefer to make money with picture agency like Corbi$?
>
> I don't think that's entirely necessary.  With the increasing use of
> email, emails are not entirely inadmissable in court these days.
> think an unambiguous email from, say, the copyright office of a museum
> saying that a work is licensed under the GFDL would be sufficient to
> defend us against a copyright-infringement lawsuit.

I only talk about pictures with an hight financial interest, like Mona Lisa or
others. Even when the court accept emails - how can we trust that one
anonymous is not faking the email from this museum?

For the wikipedia seems paper licences in special cases like more work, but in
the end, it could be less work to know that 500 very famos pictures has an
waterproof licence. Some people could missuse wikipedia with such pictures.

> We don't, after all, require contributors such as myself to mail paper
> contracts to Wikipedia authorizing our article contributions to be
> GFDL'd, so I don't see why image-licensing should be much different.

Maybe it is more easy to find Copy&pasted text. Even when three sentences are
copied word by word (I hope we will avoid this too) from one book, three
sentences are only a few comparing with 300 pages. Whith a photo is this
different.

When people do not make money with their esprit or hands, they go to court to
get someones money. The wikipedia does not make money, but could reduse the
win of others. So especialy for en.wikipdia I fear the first lawsuit
inbetween the next 12 month.

The main owner of the picture agence Corbi$ is Bill Gate$.

Do you want to know how far the expansion for the rightholders is already "at
work" take a look to the EU, the media lobbiest want to skip the discussion
of the parlament and to get this into law:
http://www.ipjustice.org/CODE/021604.html

" (13) It is necessary to define the scope of this Directive as widely as
possible in order to encompass all the intellectual property rights covered
by Community provisions in this field and/or by the national law of the
Member State concerned. Nevertheless, that requirement does not affect the
possibility, on the part of those Member States which so wish, to extend, for
internal purposes, the provisions of this Directive to include acts involving
unfair competition, including parasitic copies, or similar activities."

UNFAIR COMPETITION, PARASITIC COPIES OR SIMILAR ACTIVITIES.

And your are still discussion "Fair use" - the Wikipedia has a finantial
dimension, it reduse the win of rightholders = Parasitisc.

Der Ko-Autor des Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Bob Goodlattee, hat
seine EU-Kollegen bei einem Treffen der European Internet Foundation in der
vergangenen Woche in einem harten Kurs gerade auch gegen die privaten
Filesharer best?tigt. Goodlattee stellte dabei die Verh?ltnisse in den USA,
wo den Rechteinhaber selbst eine Art polizeirechtlicher Status zugebilligt
werde, als beispielhaft dar.

The co-author of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Bob Goodlatte
was last week in Europe and he motivated members of the European parlament to
go a tough course against people who share files. Goodlatte sees the
situation in the USA, where right holders has police-like rights is
exemplary.

When we do not lobby to save the status quo,
and do not take care, that all pictures has waterproof licences,
we go into deep truble in very close future.

Paper licences could be a way, and some of you should start to think about
them, and start to use them, as good exampel.

Greetings form Aachen, Europe
rob


from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
In message <20040220004904.GA11707 at wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>, Tomasz
Wegrzanowski <taw-iA+eEnwkJgzk1uMJSBkQmQ at public.gmane.org> writes
>On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 04:40:54PM -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
>> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>>
>> >>There is clearly no consensus to delete images we
>> >>have permission to use.
>> >>
>> >
>> >But we obviously don't. I can't legally print it with the article and sell
>> >it,
>> >so it's not acceptable.
>> >
>> What makes you so sure about that? Are you a copyright expert, or have you
>> gotten a statement to that effect from a copyright expert?
>
>    Maveric149 (Photo of [[Dolly the sheep]] owned by [[Roslin
>Institute]] obtained
>    from http://www.roslin.ac.uk/library/ . This image "...may be used
>free of charge
>    by education, public sector or non-profit making groups
>
>Is there anything unclear about that ?
>It's not even a "fair use" stuff, it's plain breaking copyright laws.

There's nothing unclear about it. When did we start making a profit?
Therefore we are adequately covered at the moment.

Your behaviour on [[Dolly the sheep]] tonight has been an abuse of your
sysop powers. en: has perfectly adequate procedures to handle suspected
copyright violations -- use them, do not resort to vigilantism.

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 10:31:51PM +0000, Caroline Ford wrote:
> And you should be ashamed by abusing sysop rights by deleting an image
> without discussion.

I'm going to use sysops powers as much as I see fit in copyright and
vandalism related matters.

> There is clearly no consensus to delete images we
> have permission to use.

But we obviously don't. I can't legally print it with the article and sell it,
so it's not acceptable.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:

>2) Does the fact that we can _get away_ with fair use mean we should do it? We
>could probably get away with a lot of suspicious activities that would increase
>Wikipedia article output which we aren't pursuing. Just because you can,
>doesn't mean it's right. To me it's the difference between short term goals and
>long term goals.
>
Fair use is not a matter of "getting away" with anything, nor is it a
"suspicious activity".  Pretending that using fair-use material is
somehow a criminal activity shows a gross misunderstanding of the law.
 Fair use is perfectly legal; that's why it's in the copyright law.  It
remains fair use independently of the license that is used.  A
downstream user who puts it in his own work does so at his own risk;
we're not babysitters.

Ec


body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 04:40:54PM -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> >>There is clearly no consensus to delete images we
> >>have permission to use.
> >>
> >
> >But we obviously don't. I can't legally print it with the article and sell
> >it,
> >so it's not acceptable.
> >
> What makes you so sure about that? Are you a copyright expert, or have you
> gotten a statement to that effect from a copyright expert?

    Maveric149 (Photo of [[Dolly the sheep]] owned by [[Roslin Institute]] obtained
    from http://www.roslin.ac.uk/library/ . This image "...may be used free of charge
    by education, public sector or non-profit making groups

Is there anything unclear about that ?
It's not even a "fair use" stuff, it's plain breaking copyright laws.


from_name: Allan Crossman

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images

body:
Just adding my opinion, which is that there's not enough images on
Wikipedia as it is. Imposing stringent rules isn't going to help. For
a very many things, the only source is going to be fair use.

--
Allan Crossman - http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
PGP keys - 0x06C4BCCA (new) || 0xCEC9FAE1 (compatible)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] free maps?

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>On [[en:Talk:James Cook]] someone asked for a map of his travels. I could
>make such, but I would like to have a map to start from. Are there somewhere
>maps available that can be used for cases like this? Would it be an idea to
>have a map collection somewhere on Wikipedia to work from?
>
>
If you check [[User:Morwen]]'s contribution history on the en: wiki,
he's been contributing literally thousands of maps of counties and
provinces and whatnot.  I believe he mostly traces the outlines from
maps in books, which isn't a copyright violation since it's just
reproducing the factual information (a standard map projection of
geographical data).  Then he does shading and so on in an image-editing
program.

Ideally we would simply import a lot of GIS data and auto-generate maps
based on it ("i want a mercatur projection from this latitude/longitude
to this latitude/longitude, with cities over 1m people labeled), but
auto-generated maps, at least with freely-available software,
unfortunately look pretty terrible.  There's a few scattered around on
Wikipedia, though I can't seem to find one at the moment, and they all
look like the sort of thing you might have expected a computer-generated
map to look like circa 1982.

-Mark


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
>It seems to me that the only sensible solution to
>the image problems we being discussed is the
>tagging of images as "GNU FDL" or "fair use".

Yes - either tagging or database segregation is the right thing to do. But it
isn't as simple as GFDL vs fair use. There are other free licenses and public
domain files. 'Fair use' also has different levels since it depends on the
*use* - some uses (such as stills from TV or a movie) would be fair to have in
articles no matter what the use of the article is. Other things (such as a
complex diagram from a recently-published textbook) is only going to be fair
use for non-commercial educational purposes (which may not be compatible with
the spirit of the FDL).

But IANAL.

-- mav

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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Reversion Wars and Point of View

body:
This matter is partially before the arbitration committee with respect to
RickK. I question whether anything can be done with respect to this sort of
situation (which you, 172, and I have also sometimes been in). There is at
present no rule regarding reversions, however extensive, simply a proposed
rule of 3. Likewise advocacy of a right or left wing cultural and political
point of view is common among a number of Wikipedia editors including
ourselves. I fear that to a certain extent this is simply monkey see, monkey
do.

I suggest that the solution to the general problem is to made an actually
enforceable rule regarding repeated reversions. An additional issue is to
insist that an article which falls along a left-right cultural and political
spectrum include material which authentically sets forth both viewpoints.

Fred

> From: "Abe Sokolov" <abesokolov at hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 08:53:20 +0000
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Hector vs. VV/RickK proxy flame wars
>
> I?ve been trying unsuccessfully to keep the recent changes list from looking
> lik this: HectorRodriguez's reversion of VeryVerily's additions to [[mass
> murder]], RickK's reversions of HectorRodriguez's reversions,
> HectorRodriguez's reversions of VeryVerily's reversions of HectorRodriguez's
> reversion, RickK's reversions of HectorRodriguez's reversions of
> VeryVerily's reversions of HectorRodriguez's of [[Manuel Noriega]],
> [[Panama]], [[History of Panama]], [[Communist Party of France]], [[Saddam
> Hussein]], [[mass murder]], and countless other articles.
>
> In effect, RickK and VV have been automatically (and arbitrarily) reverting
> every single edit by Hector, subjecting him to a policy of auto revert
> reserved only for hard-banned trolls - a recipe for edit wars. On a positive
> note, RickK showed signs of agreeing to change his tactics in a recent edit
> to the Saddam page, which addressed content issues without the ad hominems.
> VV, however, still feels no need to defend his edits with counter-arguments
> backed up by factual evidence on the talk pages. He calls Hector a vandal,
> which he feels is sufficient reason to delete any edit by this user. When I
> try to give him advice for avoiding edit wars, he attacks me incessantly and
> refuses to contemplate his own biases.
>
> Someone else has to put a stop to these silly ideological proxy battles. I
> keep on failing to steer the discussion toward content issues.
>
> See my comments on [[Talk:Saddam Hussein]], [[Talk:Manuel Noriega]], and
> [[Talk:Mass murder]] for further details.
>
> User:172
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee when you click here.
> http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Let's go slow

body:
Hey, I hear that people are starting to unilaterally delete images and
get into fights on the wiki over "fair use" based on my comments the
past few days.  Let's not do that.  Let's take it slow.

There are no legal problems with what we're doing, it's more a
question of our broader desire to be good GNU citizens.  So there's no
need to urgent go around deleting things.

--Jimbo


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] free maps?

body:
On Friday 20 February 2004 05:54, Delirium wrote:
> Ideally we would simply import a lot of GIS data and auto-generate maps
> based on it ("i want a mercatur projection from this latitude/longitude
> to this latitude/longitude, with cities over 1m people labeled), but
> auto-generated maps, at least with freely-available software,
> unfortunately look pretty terrible.  There's a few scattered around on
> Wikipedia, though I can't seem to find one at the moment, and they all
> look like the sort of thing you might have expected a computer-generated
> map to look like circa 1982.

There's a Mapmaking Expedition on Wikitravel. So far there are two programs
(one's locked in my laptop hard drive until I get the laptop back, the
other's by Yosemite) and a few maps. Both programs take lat/long data and
produce an SVG file, which we then convert to PNG with Sodipodi.

phma


body:
Caroline Ford wrote:
> Contributors can only take photos of things such as places, or objects.
> They cannot take pictures of  things that no longer exist, or of famous
> people.

If the things that no longer exist are old enough, then any existing
photographs will be public domain.  For things that are more recent,
illustrations provide an excellent alternative.  If we need
illustrations, then we should think of ways to empower artistic
volunteers to help us by creating and contributing them.

For famous people, I think it's generally not true that contributors
can't take pictures of them.  Again, we just need to publicize our
need and work a little harder to empower volunteers.  Almost all
famous people make public appearances.  Movies stars appear in public
in Hollywood, New York, Cannes, and other film festivals.  Politicians
make speechs to public audiences.  Famous intellectuals are generally
accessible.

All famous people have an interest in publicity -- fame is power and
money.  So if for some reason we can't get a photo from a public
appearance, they ought to be very amenable to releasing a single
publicity shot under the GNU FDL.

We are big and getting bigger.  Millions of people see our work each
year.  Millions of people love what we are doing, love the idea of it,
and would love to help.  We need to give them tools and incentives to
do exactly that.

We have great tools for people who like to write.  I propose that we
develop great tools for amateur paparazzi, amateur illustrators, and
amateur photographers.

--Jimbo


body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 09:08:34PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
> Stan Shebs wrote:
>
> >Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >
> >>>There is clearly no consensus to delete images we have permission to
> >>>use.
> >>>
> >>
> >>But we obviously don't. I can't legally print it with the article and
> >>sell it,
> >>so it's not acceptable.
> >>
> >What makes you so sure about that? Are you a copyright expert, or have
> >you
> >gotten a statement to that effect from a copyright expert?
>
> I'm not a lawyer, but that interpretation seems consistent with the "do
> fair use images violate the GFDL?" discussion.  Fair use images, it
> appears, do not in fact violate the GFDL, because they're a special case
> of conditionally-public-domain material, so the GFDL doesn't apply,
> because copyright law does not apply.  But with special-permission
> images, copyright law *does* apply.  And the GFDL explicitly prohibits
> editing a GFDL work by inserting non-GFDL'd components.
>
> There is the aggregation defense that has been alluded to, but I think
> inserting an image in-line in an article is clearly making it part of
> the article as one work, not merely distributing it on the same medium.
> If all the images were on separate pages (as in an appendix, perhaps),
> then that'd be another matter.
>
> So, in my non-legal opinion, I don't think we can legally include
> special-permission images in GFDL'd articles, as doing so is a violation
> of the GFDL's "all edits must also be GFDL'd" requirement.
>
> (Again, fair use and public domain images excepted.)

The point of fair use is that '''certain use''' is fair, not arbitrary use -
and the copyright still applies. And this effectively restricts what can be
legally done with a work created using both GFDL and fair use material,
and thus breaks the GFDL.

So we need to separate nonfree content somewhere else, and then we can claim
it's mere aggregation.


body:
Sascha Noyes wrote:
> Have a look at [[My Lai Massacre]], [[Donald Rumsfeld]], etc. There
> are plenty of historical events that have copyrighted pictures,
> where there is no possibility of replacing them with free
> ones. (Unless, of course, you have a time machine)

Your point is a valid point, however I'd say that a handful of "fair
use" images of extreme historical importance is a red herring.  What I
mean is, there are a few of those, and they may be cases where we come
down on the side of relying on fair use, but they aren't relevant to
the central issue.

I'm much more concerned about images like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Barrymore

That's a non-free "fair use" image of Drew Barrymore that suppresses
demand for a free alternative.  And a free alternative is almost
certainly possible.  Drew Barrymore is a famous actress who regularly
makes public appearances.  She surely has a PR firm with access to her
and to images of her that could be released under a free license.

Think about where we will be 10 years from now.  Will we have a large
and free encyclopedia with tons of non-free images?  Or will we have a
large and free encyclopedia with a massive collection of free images?
How can we get to where we want to be?

I think that the answer lies in not using non-free licenses or
excessive "fair use" exemptions as a crutch.  That crutch will prevent
us from ever getting to where we want to go.

--Jimbo


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair Use material in Wikipedia

body:
I find this entire argument about "fair use" images annoying.  When I
contacted Her Majesty's Stationery Office to inquire about the use of
Crown Copyright material, I was told that Wikipedia could use that
material as long as we used it accurately and not disparagingly -- no
problem -- but that we also had to require that anyone else using it
had to also comply with those restrictions.  Opinion was overwhelming
that since we can't pass on those restrictions, even though we have no
problem complying with them ourselves, we can't use the material.

What's the difference?

--
 Sean Barrett
 sean at epoptic.com


body:
Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> What about for instance book covers?  They are definitely not
> something you can usually have under a free licence. But fair use
> probably applies (since the cover isn't the book itself).

What would the "fair use" status of a book cover be in Great Britian?
In Australia?

I'm asking because I don't know, but I think it's relevant to the
decision here.

Fair use is an important doctrine, and one that we should defend and
push for as a natural right.  If fair use is legitimate, and would be
legitimate for virtually every conceivable re-user (i.e. barring some
silly hypothetical) we should feel comfortable relying on it if it's
valuable and, as in this case, there is no conceivable alternative.

So, what is the status of something like this in Great Britain?

--Jimbo


body:
Gareth Owen wrote:
> Actually, wikipedia was meant to be little more than a chalkboard
> for Nupedia.  Things change.  It's a funny old world.

Yes, but my goal from the very beginning has always been Free with a
capital F.  That applied to Nupedia as well as Wikipedia.

I'm sympathetic to the concerns you've been raising, but I'm not
convinced that there's tension between "making a great encyclopedia"
and "making a GNU-free encyclopedia".

That is, I don't think refusing images under a non-free license and
being extremely cautious about "fair use" means that we will have less
images *in the long run*.  We just have to be creative and
enterpreneurial and energetic -- all of which we excel at.

The tension is between "convenience" and "freedom".  It's convenient
to use Microsoft Windows.  It's freedom-promoting to use GNU/Linux.

--Jimbo

p.s.  Anyone who says that the GNU FDL is problematic in its current
form will get no argument from me.  I don't agree with some of the
criticisms of the license, but I do think that it's needlessly
specific and should be simplified and generalized.  It was written for
the purpose of software documentation, and clearly contemplated a
number of authors and a "history" much shorter than what we have.

I have great optimism, though, that the license will be tuned and
improved in the future.  RMS has indicated interest in helping us with
that.


body:
Gareth Owen wrote:
> Are we to scour the world for the most strict censorship laws
> in order to comply with those as well?

I find this entire discussion about copyright laws and censorship to
be puzzling, perhaps because I think I have a valid principle by which
to decide such things.

We ought to obey the laws of as many countries as possible, consistent
with our goal of creating a freely distributable *and* NPOV
encyclopedia.

If the laws of China would ask to do something biased in order to
distribute there, we would refuse.  Our neutrality is something that
we cannot compromise on.

But the decision to be rigorously GNU-free does not generally get in
the way of neutrality.  Restrictive copyright laws that don't let us
have "fair use" don't mean that we can't be neutral.  They just mean
that we have to do some extra work to remain free.

--Jimbo


body:
Abigail Brady wrote:
> With the respect to photos of politicians, which Caroline had been
> negotiating for, I doubt very much the parties would have agreed to put
> them into the public domain or licence them under the GFDL, but I
> suspect the main reason there is not fear of loss of revenue, but fear
> of the images being used in a derogatory way.

I wonder.

At least in the U.S., politicians are almost completely fair game for
parody and satire.  Completely separate from fair use is the "parody"
exception to copyright.  For someone to take a photo of a politician
and alter it so that the politician looks like a moron is a cherised
right of the people.

So refusing a free license for that reason wouldn't really make sense.

I suspect rather that any reluctance to release under a free license
would come more from a lack of knowledge of the concept.

But here's a key.  Wikipedia is more popular than Britannica.  We are
rapidly becoming a major cultural force.  In many ways, it is a great
honor to be featured in Wikipedia, and to have your photograph even
moreso.  But if the requirement for that is that you need to release
your picture under a free license, that's a very small price to pay.

(It's actually no "price" at all.)

What does the politician give up?  Nothing, because these pictures are
not for the purpose of earning revenue anyway.  They are publicity
photos.  What does the politician get?  Guaranteed world-wide
distribution in the most important general knowledgebase in the world.

We should not underestimate our power, which grows daily.

--Jimbo


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> No it means that many things will *never* have images. For example,
> Dolly the Sheep is dead. The only images of her are either from the
> news media or from the Roslin Institute. Therefore I used the images
> from the Roslin Institute.  The license on those images states that
> they can be freely used in a noncommercial setting so long as credit
> is given. I have done that.

1. We could have an illustration.

2. We could explain to the Roslin Institute who we are (though, as our
fame grows, they will know who we are anyway in a year or two) and ask
that just *one* image be released under a free license.  (I would
recommend Creative Commons attribution share alike, because it is easy
to read and understand, and more directly applicable to images than
the FDL.)

3.  We could contact the news media, who generally love us, and ask
for a single photo from their archives.  (To date, I have not had a
single interview with any reporter who didn't gush over our project
and take a few minutes after the interview telling me some little
anecdote about how our work has positively impacted there life in at
least some small way.  Earlier this week, a reporter told me that
Wikipedia helped him pass his citizenship test.)

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] China WP access (was: What would Richard Stallman
	say?)

body:
Gareth Owen wrote:
> Incidentally the following is a perfect example of an image used
> under Fair Use provision :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tianasquare.jpg I think wikipedia
> would be much worse without it.

Gareth, although I'm certainly of the 'hardliner' faction here, I
agree with you.  I think this is a case of an image that is perfectly
o.k. for us to use.

This is one of a handful of images that are of unique historical
importance.  This is an image that defines for most people what is
important about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.  The lone
unarmed individual standing with courage against the overwhelming
power of a totalitarian state is what that event means to most people.

I think that in this case, there is no plausible alternative to fair
use (although a really good illustration is possible, I think that the
actual photo is what has impact), but also the factors governing fair
use all go in the right direction here.

In other cases, though, and [[Drew Barrymore]] is my favorite for
today, there is no free alternative only in the sense that there's no
immediately convenient free alternative.

--Jimbo


body:
Erik calls me a zealot below, but I actually agree with everything he
says.  :-)  So there's really just a matter of perspective, I guess.

One thing that I absolutely do agree with him about is that harmony
within the community demands a process whereby we work hard to examine
the fair use status.  And I also agree that it's very important that
we be diligent about searching for alternatives.

Erik Moeller wrote:

> Jimmy-
> > If the things that no longer exist are old enough, then any existing
> > photographs will be public domain.  For things that are more recent,
> > illustrations provide an excellent alternative.
>
> Not really. Do you want to substitute the photo of Mother Teresa with
> Charles Keating with an "illustration", a drawing? Not only would that be
> extremely silly, it would probably be seen as a derivative work and
> therefore still copyrighted. And it would give the upper hand to those who
> want to get rid of this image, and other images like it, for political
> reasons, give them yet another instrument of censorship.
>
> Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo. When did the GNU bug bite you and turn you into a
> zealot? We should subject each fair use image to an examination process in
> which we seek to determine whether we can obtain an image by other means.
> If that is so, we should try everything -- request permission, create our
> own image etc. -- and leave the article without an image in the meantime.
> This examination should be a group process like votes for deletion. For
> example, I could upload an image and provide contact information, and
> someone else would try to request permission from that person.
>
> If everything else fails, however, it would be extraordinarily stupid not
> to make use of the exemptions which copyright law explictly grants us (and
> to those who keep claiming that no equivalent law exists in other
> countries -- that's simply not true, most copyright laws have exemptions
> for scientific and educational use, e.g. Sec. 51 of the German copyright
> code). It would be a slap in the face of those who have been lobbying for
> broader fair use provisions.
>
> This process is without alternative. Anything else *will* split this
> community.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
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