Via OKFN - forwarding, as possibly of some interest. Hopefully this
will make it to the new list okay!
This is an excellent suggestion, I think. It's proposing a charitable
organisation which would:
a) acquire copyrights (probably by bequest) in order to freely license them;
b) act as a clearinghouse to support "selling" the free licensing of
creative works (we pay you $1,000, you release your novel as CC-BY-SA)
c) support people contesting dubious takedown notices
d) support and train people in freely licensing their own work
(distribution logistics, negotiating with publishers, etc)
Of these, a) and b) are probably the most interesting from the WMF
perspective - c) is a bit outside our scope most of the time, and d)
is already something we [should be? are?] aiming to do.
We have definitely discussed option a) in the (distant) past on
foundation-l, and while it may not be something WMF itself wants to
get into handling, it's certainly something we would benefit from
someone else doing - it increases the amount of quality free content
in the long term, and does so by offering a mechanism which may
encourage people who would not otherwise be willing to contribute
their material at the present time. I don't think we've ever
considered b), but if it does get off the ground it's certainly
something which would benefit us!
Any thoughts?
-Andrew.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock(a)okfn.org>
Date: 10 April 2012 09:41
Subject: [okfn-discuss] Fwd: "Free Culture Conservancy" exploratory
meeting in NY, April 12th.
To: okfn-discuss <okfn-discuss(a)lists.okfn.org>
May be of interest to members of the list (those based near NYC!).
Rufus
-----
From: Karl Fogel <kfogel(a)questioncopyright.org>
To: <a bunch of people>
Subject: "Free Culture Conservancy" exploratory meeting in NY, April 12th.
Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:40:57 -0500
This mail is written so you can easily respond with just "Yes" :-).
Feel free to forward it within your organization.
It's about an experiment we want to try -- and we want to be able to
say that your organization agrees the experiment is worth making. Can
we say that? Read on.
(We're not asking for material help. We'll do a Kickstarter campaign for that.)
Also, you are welcome to come to our meeting about this in New York
City on Thursday, April 12th at 2pm, at 1995 Broadway, 17th floor.
This is short notice, so if you can't make it, don't worry -- there
will be other chances with longer notice. But we'd love to see you
there.
So:
We're considering forming a Free Culture Conservancy, a long-term
non-profit that would perform several interrelated functions:
* A repository for copyright estates.
We've heard from some artists (including one very well-known
one, who has asked to remain anonymous) that they'd be
interested in having their works released under free licenses
[1] after their death, and that the mechanism they feel most
comfortable with is to will the copyrights to an organization
that commits to such release. There various reasons why
artists might prefer that mechanism; for one thing, an actual
transfer of the "property" can avoid certain kinds of
resistance from heirs.
* A liberation facilitator.
Some time ago, we had an idea that government copyright
offices could serve as a registry of liberation prices [2]: a
copyright holder could record publicly the amount they would
accept to liberate a given work either into the public domain
or into free licensing. (There are a couple of more steps to
it, but that's the basic idea.)
Then we realized that a private foundation could serve as
such a registry too -- there's no need to wait for
governments to do it. Furthermore, doing it in the private
sector makes an interesting model possible:
On one side, the Conservancy approaches publishers and other
groups that have large, unprofitable backlists, and
negotiates liberation prices in binding contracts (i.e., "You
agree that if we bring you the specified amount of money,
you'll liberate this specific work. If we don't bring the
money, nothing happens.") It also approaches individual
authors with the same message, when the author has the
necessary rights.
On the other side, the Conservancy solicits confidential
requests from anyone (say, a cause-driven group with an
interest in a particular work being publicly available); it
also encourages such requests where it can. When such a
request is received, the Conservancy keeps it confidential,
but makes sure to include the requested work among the works
discussed in some larger negotiation with the relevant
current rights holder.
The Conservancy is explicit about the fact that this is going
on; it just doesn't reveal the exact works, in order to avoid
affecting a rights holder's assessment of backlist market
value. (Another way to say it is, the Conservancy plays an
information asymmetry game, but is open about the fact that
it is doing so.)
For some works, the stars will line up, and there will now be
a credible way for people to fundraise (e.g., on Kickstarter)
to liberate that work -- because the target price has been
set and won't suddenly go up as soon as the buyers get near
their fundraising goal. The Conservancy may stay in the
middle, enabling it both to take a small percentage on top of
the actual liberation price in order to fund its operations,
and to enable contributions toward liberation to be
tax-deductible for U.S. citizens.
* Institutional backing for takedown counterclaims.
There are many instances of videos or music being taken off
of sites (e.g. YouTube) due to incorrect infringement claims.
It's tough for an individual author to handle these, but an
organization might be able to provide some economies of
scale.
* Training and instruction on how to free works, distribute, etc.
Question Copyright has already been doing a little of this,
but fundamentally we're an advocacy organization that
concentrates on reframing public debate -- which is different
from a service organization that works with artists and
distributors.
Nina Paley has held "How To Free Your Work" workshops. We've
also helped several artists negotiate free (or "free-er")
licenses with their publishers, and see an increasing need
for that -- e.g., for template contract language, guidelines
for authors on how to negotiate time-delayed free licensing
into their contracts, etc.
But all this would be more appropriate for a separate Free
Culture Conservancy to do it, with a mission & program
profile better suited to such services, and without a
provocative name like "Question Copyright" making it hard for
organizations such as the Authors Guild to even sit down and
talk.
Our next step, assuming the idea survives the NYC meeting :-), is a
Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to start it. I think its
prospects are good; the idea is explainable, and there are a lot of
people out there who would be willing to try this experiment.
Kickstarter funding will probably be decisive: major initiatives need
funding, and if we don't raise enough, then this one will have to
wait. There's a certain value to just having the idea circulating
anyway -- but we'd like to do more than just have the idea circulate,
and being able to claim your support for this experiment would make
our Kickstarter pitch that much stronger.
In the long term, this won't be a program of Question Copyright; it
should be an independent organization (hopefully with your
involvement). We may start it off as a QCO program, to take advantage
of our existing 501(c)(3) infrastructure, bookkeeping, etc, in the
early stages.
We would appreciate your feedback, and feedback from others in your
organizations. If you can make it to the meeting in New York next
week, that would be great.
Thanks,
-Karl Fogel
[1] "Free licensing" in this context is shorthand for any license that
meets the Freedom Defined terms -- so CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC0, for
example, though not -ND and -NC.
[2] http://questioncopyright.org/declared_value
--
Co-Founder, Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/
_______________________________________________
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okfn-discuss(a)lists.okfn.org
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--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
(Forwarding this to the Wikimedia list, as it's really more suited to
that list.)
Thanks for sharing this, Sumana - at Wikimedia UK we're going to be
delivering a 'Train the Trainers' program over the next year - more
details are at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Train_the_Trainers_Tender.
The trustee in charge of our education budget, Martin Poulter, has
really pushed this from a vague plan to an actual programme, and
hopefully once it's up and running we'll be able to expand that page
rather a lot!
Richard Symonds
Office& Development Manager
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 207 065 0992
--
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Charitable Company
Registered in England and Wales, No: 6741827. Charity No:1144513 Office: 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street,
London EC2A 4LT.
Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate
Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit
organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for
its contents.
On 06/04/2012 14:28, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> Ever since I came across the concept of androgogy (teaching adults - as
> opposed to pedagogy, teaching children) I've been interested in ways of
> less hierarchical ways of teaching and learning. I'm thrilled that the
> Wikimedia outreach community has put this together:
>
> https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Best_practices_in_training_adults
>
> It really is worth a skim. I'll be using these tips in technical
> tutorials I develop.
>
As promised, a separate note about slightly revising the list
description to make it more inclusive and up-to-date:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
I've included a sentence at the bottom which is a summary of the
moderation principles that were previously posted here:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-November/056032.html
I would ask the list mods to review whether it's an accurate summary.
Please edit/discuss on-wiki; if this looks sensible, I'll make the
update later this week.
Cheers,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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* Not a Windows user? No problem. You can also connect to the Google Talk service from any platform using third-party clients
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The core group of editors at Wikitravel are interested in joining a WMF run
"Wiki Travel Guide". A proposal for creating such a project has been
outlined here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Travel_Guide and would
develop from the content currently at wikitravel.org
*Wikitravel is currently in 20 languages and in English contains more than
25,000 articles. The content is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. Site
readership statistics are not released by Internet Brands, but for travel
information the site is consistently highly ranked. It is the largest and
most popular freely-licensed, user-contributed travel guide collection.
Alexa.com ranks it as the 2637 most popular site on the web with a global
reach of 0.0602%. The interwiki links between Wikipedia and Wikitravel
highlight the close historic cooperation between the editors of both sites,
where users adding travelogue style content to Wikipedia have often been
directed to add the content to Wikitravel.
Benefits for the WMF:
1) Increase the scope of content offered by the WMF
2) Increase the number of Wikimedians
3) Increase the volume of content for fundraising
4) Provide a separate repository for important travel and tourism
information, some of which currently is contained within Wikipedia articles.
Benefits for travel content:
1) Reputation of the WMF would increase the editor base.
2) Remove the conflicts between the commercial decisions of the current
hosting provider and the community.
3) Would increase the reliability of the site, which is currently running
old MediaWiki versions, on poorly performing infrastructure.
Benefits for both:
1) Would make it easier for the two sites to direct editors to the better
site for the content in question, leading to better focus within articles.
2) Combining the image repositories at Wikimedia Commons would result in
greater and easier image availability for both Wikipedia and the travel
site, and an increase in both contributors and images.*
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 8:42 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8 April 2012 13:39, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I've sent you and Ryan an e-mail with a link to the deletion discussion.
>
> In a discussion like this, secret evidence is approximately worthless.
Indeed. This is the link I received by mail:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/ObiWolf_Lesbian…
Bencmq wrote:
> I believe the closing admins' arguments also include that by uploading those
> images to Flickr, those actress would have already given consent?
Yes. Though the original uploader is rarely also the subject, and may
not have such consent. If the uploader did not upload directly to
Commons (but had their photos scraped from Flickr), and shows up later
to say that they made a mistake in setting their Flickr prefs and that
they or their subjects did not give consent for such distirbution, it
is hard to gainsay them.
In these cases I think we should accede to the photographer's request,
unless we have a strong specific reason to keep the image, after
reasonably verifying their identity.
Ryan Kaldari writes:
> What was the justification for not following the Photographs of identifiable people guideline?
Maarten Dammers writes:
> That probaby has to do with the fact that some people tried to (ab)use this rule to get images
> deleted they didn't like. Say I take http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_SOPA_Boiler_Roo…
> If I would want to get rid of that picture I just say we don't have consent documented.
Those people are identifiable and in a private place. If the
photographer showed up and denied having consent, would we not
promptly take that photo down?
If one of the subjects showed up and denied giving consent and asked
for the photo to be removed, we should see if the photographer had
gotten consent. If not, again -- would we not take the photo down?
If not, then I must be misunderstanding that Commons guideline.
Sam.
