On Fri, 30 May 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote: Maybe a new SQL field for images? Something like copyright tinyint(2) NOT NULL 1 = public domain 2 = explicit GFDL 3 = fair use 4 = copyright holder permission 5 = don't redistribute 6 = stolen 7 = don't know to be filled with a checkbox in the image upload page? Ciao, Alfio

Tomasz- It would be silly not to allow the freedoms given to us by the law to the maximum possible extent. Obviously free images (PD/FDL) are always preferable to non-free ones, but so long as Wikipedia remains redistributable AND forkable, I see no problem with using fair use pictures or those under equivalent semi-free licenses. Keep in mind that the freedom to modify is, for images, not nearly as important as for text.[1] How do you propose acquiring a free photo of a prominent, recently deceased author or actor? A picture of an important historical event? This is unrealistic -- you won't, and with your attitude, we will simply have no image for that article, while Encarta et al. will sport a nice gallery of them. Unacceptable. Fair use is acceptable as per the current consensus on [[Wikipedia:Image use policy]]. You may use any quasi-dictatorial powers you have on pl. to enforce your point of view, but this will not be possible on en. Having a status flag in the database would be very helpful for forkers, but we should not encourage uploading photos under licenses that limit redistribution. But a little more Linus Torvalds style pragmatism and a little less Richard Stallman style zealotry wouldn't hurt either. What we should allow: --------------------- 1) public domain 2) FDL 3) fair use 4) free for non-commercial use. This is similar to fair use, but less vague. 5) Creative Commons licenses (e.g. Attribution) and FDL-equivalent open content licenses What we should not allow: ------------------------- 1) Copyrighted, no permission (duh) 2) No permission to redistribute other than for Wikipedia (prevents forking) 3) Advertising or prominent copyright notices in images that cannot be removed 4) Other restrictive licenses Regards, Erik [1] And before someone starts mentioning all the important crop and resizing operations we do on images, these would not constitute license violations because they do not substantially alter the source image.

Daniel- Hardly an argument. You can always end up being sued. The question is whether the other side wins. Regards, Erik

Daniel- That's why having a non-profit organization is a good idea. It is one of the best arguments to join the GNU project when developing free software, for example -- still, most people are understandably irritated by their zealous nature. For Wikipedia, we will have the Nupedia Foundation to offer legal protection. Only that the "SCO debacle" happened in spite of assurances by everyone that only GNU GPL code was involved -- according to SCO, however, IBM screwed up. Aside from the fact that the entire lawsuit is a Microsoft FUD project, all this demonstrates is that in spite of your best intentions, you can still get sued -- exactly what I've been saying. It makes no sense to ignore the freedoms offered to us by law -- and one of these freedoms, in the US and most other civilized nations, is fair use -- only because some people might interpret that law differently. Realistically, the only real threat to Wikipedia is that someone will send us a nasty letter to take this or that image down, which we obviously will do in most cases. What you are promoting is to give up freedom because the Large Evil Corporations have deeper pockets. I don't think we should give in that easily. See also: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/avoid_copyright_paranoia It makes sense to be careful, it makes sense to use open content whenever possible. But a purely ideological stance is counter productive. I find it quite ironic that the most ardent advocates of open content also frequently adopt a police state mentality with regard to perceived violations. I'm all for double checking. I'm against saying "Everything but the GNU FDL or public domain is forbidden". I'm against removing images prematurely because they *might* be protected. There is no analogy to fair use in the free software world. [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia photo squad? Erik Moeller wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org Wed, 30 Oct 2002 15:51:29 +0100 (MET) http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/006804.html As you can see, I'm all for collaborative content creation. However, it will be difficult to get a nice FDL photo of Clark Gable, because the guy's been dead for quite a while. Incidentally, the current article about Clark Gable uses a copyrighted photo, uploaded by Zoe, a long-time Wikipedian who is also very careful about finding and reporting copyright infringements. Fair use is a common practice on Wikipedia, and I don't think that should change. Regards, Erik

Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote: I agree with Erik on this. Simply guessing that something is copyright doesn't make it so. It's all a question of whether you interpret copyright laws liberally in favour of the user or liberally in favour of the putative copyright owner. The fear of being sued is a red herring; we are very far from any possibility that such a thing might happen. With the safe harbor provisions of copyright law we would have ample opportunity to remove offending material before it went that far. Notification of copyright violation would have to come first from the copyright OWNER or his AUTHORIZED representative, not from some disinterested 3rd party do-gooder with unschooled guesses about what the law says. Effectively violating copyright is very easy to do. I have hundreds of copyright books in my personal library that I could scan with OCR software, and add into a Wikipedia article without anyone EVER realizing it. That wouldn't make it right, but I'm confident that nobody would ever call my hand on it. If I can do it so can any other contributor, so let's not be naive about this. Of course, if a copyright violation is flagrant and obvious it should be removed. Unfortunately, most alleged violations are not that clear, and we should give the contributor the benefit of the doubt without descending into copyright paranoia. Eclecticology

Tomasz- I could respond on the same level, but I won't. It's a matter of balance -- what freedoms do you lose? You might lose the freedom to take all of Wikipedia's images and sell them as the "Coca Cola photo collection" for 50 bucks. Big deal. As I said, having the respective flag in the "image" table would be sufficient for any third party to easily filter out images which contradict commercial use. Because you say so? I don't care about an ideologically defined "RIGHT THING TO DO". I care about results. I don't know about pl:, but policies on en: are developed through discussions. This is how the current image use policy was created. Jimbo has said that fair use, in limited scope, is acceptable. I agree: Fair use is the last desirable of all choices because it is so vaguely defined. It should only be used for very important images. No, I am thinking very much about how Wikipedia will look 10 years from now. Regards, Erik

On Friday 30 May 2003 18:38, Marco Krohn wrote: obiously this should read: "... we have no image for that." Marco

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Je Vendredo 30 Majo 2003 03:09, Erik Moeller skribis: I assume you're referring to the row over linking binary-only modules in the Linux kernel. For the uninitiated: The GPL license forbids linking GPL'd code with non-GPL'able code, excluding standard system libraries on non-free operating systems. This is to prevent fake "free" code that in fact is dependant on third-party non-free libraries in order to function. The Free Software Foundation claims that this forbids _any_ linking, including dynamic run-time linking such as is common today in plug-in module/driver architectures. Linus doesn't interpret it this way, and says it's okay to distribute binary-only (non-free, no-source, limited distribution) driver modules that can be linked into the GPL'd Linux kernel at run-time. Coupla notes: * Said modules are distributed by their copyright owners with the supported hardware, not as part of the Linux kernel. * The Linux kernel runs just fine without them. The modules provide additional support for certain hardware only. * Said linking is done at run time on the user's machine; the combined result exists only in memory and is never redistributed. So by analogy "Linus Torvalds style pragmatism" might provide for a third-party filter program that inserts non-FDL images into Wikipedia articles on a reader's computer as they're loaded. ;) But it's real questionable whether it could mean "sure, let's put a whole bunch of stuff that's not compatible with our license directly into our main distribution and embed them directly into pages served from our server. After all, we can tell people to remove them if they can't use them (even though we say it's absolutely vital that we include these images to have a legitimate encyclopedia)." Wonderful. Can't redistribute these under the terms of the GFDL, so can't embed them in articles. This is a greyer area, as such licenses have much the same goals, but may or may not be letter-compatible. There's a fair chance that someone releasing material under such a license would be willing to dual-license if asked. How can these be shown to be distinct from claiming "fair use" on copyrighted material that hasn't given us *any* rights (the default being 'all rights reserved')? Unless one of us is a lawyer familiar with the licenses and laws involved, I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere useful at this point. :) - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brion Vibber wrote in part: Like a web browser? That's a third-party program that inserts Wikipedia's images into Wikipedia's articles on a reader's computer as they're loaded. The HTML document (the article) that we serve them has no image; we also serve them the image, which they request in reaction to our article (much as a module may be requested in reaction to the kernel's actions), but that's under fair use, not GFDL. The problem, it seems to me, isn't that we use the images, but that we pretend that we're using them under the GFDL. They're already separated out a bit (not in the download, after all), and we should separate them (or the non-free ones) out further, rather than claiming in some places that we're entirely free and GFDL, while claiming in other places that we use some images through fair use. (I'd even support placing fair use images in a separate namespace and database from the free ones, just to make things ultraclear.) Our fair use images should be treated as *auxiliary*. It should ''never'' be vital to an article that we include an image, if we can help it, not only for distribution but also for accessibility. We should make our articles as good as possible without the images, whether or not we then also decide to send an image along with it. This is true even for free images, because we may have blind readers. Of course, IANAL either. -- Toby

That's certainly an option to which I wouldn't object if it came to that. I still think it's a bit paranoid, but at least it would retain our ability to collect and describe useful information even if it did hamper its display a bit. -- Lee Daniel Crocker &lt;lee(a)piclab.com&gt; <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC

Brion- I'm for it. The resulting form contents should probably be saved in the image description, so they can be edited. I agree with the NOTE: ..., a relevant link to [[fair use]] should probably also be added. Regards, Erik

On 5/30/03 9:29 PM, "Jimmy Wales" &lt;jwales(a)bomis.com&gt; wrote: Fair use bad for Wikipedia... I have trouble understanding why this discussion is on Wikitech.

Brion Vibber wrote: Or, which is easier to handle, set a reply to: policy-l(a)wikipedia.org. In the other case you mentiiond I think we never will get a mail from you, because you are waiting for your legel representation or working to pay him ;) But to come to the subject: Any information about the duration of the code frezze? I don't want to hurry someone (for someone equals to Lee or Brion), but I remember someone mentioning a week or so. It would be nice to get some information. -- Smurf smurf(a)AdamAnt.mud.de ------------------------- Anthill inside! ---------------------------

The Cunctator wrote: Honestly, I hadn't noticed that. I just hit reply when I want to respond to something, without paying any attention to which of the mailing lists I'm responding. I assume that whoever started the thread had some reason for putting it there. :-) Ec

Brion Vibber wrote: [Brion then gives several objections that seem reasonable. But I'll comment on the ones that seem least so.] So the article-image combination is never redistributed now (given that the images aren't included in the downloaded tarball -- I believe that this what began the discussion this time around). When I say that we need to separate out the fair use pics from the free ones, I mean precisely to prepare for such redistribution in the future, where we may (in some cases) have to strip out the nonfree pics. Right, so maybe we'd have to strip them out if it were distributed thus '_`. This I don't agree with at all. When I submit GFDL text to a page, and somebody creates a modified version of that with [[Image:Foo]] in it, then they're definitely not violating the GFDL license of what I wrote. They just said "[[Image:Foo]]" next to it! The "technical limitations" are quite relevant here -- they're actually one way that HTML is much better than the printed page! All right, maybe that will make everybody happy. I can live with it, I think. That said, sometimes we can't help it. Consider all the arguments presented in recent debates for why [[Clitoris]] needs good photographs and drawings. ^_^ -- Toby

Brion- See [[fair use]]. There are very narrow limits on the kind of materials and the extent to which we can use them. Regards, Erik

Brion- Sure. Fair use is a rare exception to the rule that we should not use copyrighted materials. Regards, Erik

Jimmy Wales wrote in part: In particular, we shouldn't rely on our non-profit, educational status. If that's necessary to render our work "fair use", then we're definitely not free by GNU standards. -- Toby

Axel- Pictures are public domain if they 1) have been created before 1923 2) are produced by the US government. Obviously that leaves a lot of essential material, especially given that Wikipedia is not a US-only project, and most other nations don't have an equivalent public domain rule. The problem with that approach is that we need an exclusive world-wide license, since we need to allow unlimited redistribution and modification. This is *very* expensive for most professional photographs, and impossible for many. Regards, Erik

Axel- Which one specifically? Actually, what we need is probably a transfer of the copyright to us, or at the very least a contract that allows unlimited sublicensing. Remember, we want to allow forks, commercial re-use etc. This is what is so expensive, because it deviates from normal company licensing policies, where you are allowed to use a work *in your product*, but certainly not to give others the right to create and distribute derivative works. My, what nice rhetoric. Next you are going to accuse me of "stealing" ;-). And this from someone who thinks intellectual property rights do not exist (your user page). See where this kind of mentality is taking us? Copyright paranoia. What I do suggest is that we use common sense to determine the few cases where we think fair use law is applicable, instead of simply ignoring these few loopholes in the current restrictive copyright code. I would think that someone opposed to intellectual property would embrace the idea that we should defend and make use of our rights, instead of bowing to the pressure from copyright holders. Alas, it also has several problems: - When the website is down, the image is no longer available. Broken links often go unnoticed for longer periods of time because we have no way to systematically check them. - The image is no longer embedded in the proper context. It becomes difficult to associate image content with image text. - The reader is taken away from the Wikipedia navigational structure to a non-HTML image page. This is bad user interface design. So the win/win/win/win situation becomes a win/win/win/win/lose/lose/lose situation, at which point I think it more convenient to refer to it as a suboptimal solution. I do support this method of illustrating articles in cases where we believe fair use law not to apply, e.g. maps from Mapquest.com. We can agree that because of the risk of legal liability for Bomis.com - fair use should be kept at a minimum, - in other cases, this method should be used, - the database should contain as much information about copyright status as possible. But I do not agree with exclusively linking to copyrighted pictures. Regards, Erik

Marco- See my response to Brion: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/004200.html Specifically note that textual quotes are already a form of fair use, and more closely linked to the actual article text than images. You don't want to forbid us to quote Martin Luther King, do you? Regards, Erik

Marco- Let's be clear on one point: On en:, we are *already* allowing fair use of images. You would like to see this status *changed*. The legal case for doing so is no stronger than the case for prohibiting fair use of quotes or sounds (of which there are plenty). In fact, I will now demonstrate that it is weaker; that we need to worry more about quotes than about images. The FDL was developed primarily for books and other printed works. As such, it does not contain any reference to "linking" of any kind. The relevant sections to our discussion are the following: ---------------------------- 5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its license notice, and that you preserve all their Warranty Disclaimers. .... 7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" 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. When the Document is included in an aggregate, this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the Document. ---------------------------- What is now, in the context of Wikipedia, the work that is licensed under the FDL? It is not what the server generates, it is not what the web browser renders, for neither of these entities have the legal rights to claim a copyright. It is the document entered by the user in the Wikipedia article submission form, in its original, "transparent" wikitext source code form. This document may contain a line like [[Image:Britney_Spears.jpg]] This line of text is licensed just like all other text in the document. It is implicitly understood by the user that this line will produce an image that is rendered in-line, but the copyright status of that image is not confirmed in the article -- it is confirmed during the upload of the image. The image data is stored in a separate row in the table, and can be referenced by *several pages*. The image pages even have their own history, both for the image and the image description. The Britney image is, for all intents and purposes, a separate work. When the server creates the HTML page, it turns the above line into something like <img src="http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/2/2e/Britney_Spears.jpg"> The user's web browser then produces the *aggregate work* consisting of the text and the image by fetching both from the server, from different locations. The author did not create a "combined work" by combining the article with the line [[Image:Britney_Spears.jpg]], any more than he would by combining the article with the link [[Christina Aguilera]] or [http://www.britneyspears.com Britney official homepage]. Now what happens if I insert a Fair Use quote? We do so in the text [[Martin Luther King]] under the heading "Views on anti-Zionism", for example. This quote is indented and inserted in the source text. Martin Luther King's estate holds the copyright on all his works. The resulting article is, for all intents and purposes, a *combined work*. This means that the work as a whole has to be FDL-licensed -- which we cannot do because we do not own the King copyrights. Of course, you might argue that the quote is not copyrightable, but that is a very difficult stance to take given that even cell phone ringtones are considered "intellectual property". Directly included quotes are a much more serious legal issue than client- side included images. As I previously suggested, that might be addressed by supporting transclusion of some type, so you could say [[>Martin Luther King on Zionism]] which would automatically fetch the quote from a separate namespace (which does not have to be specified because transclusion is only possible from that namespace -- hey, even my hypothetical features have to be user friendly) and insert it in the proper place. This would put quotes on the same legal level as image pages (with the distinction that the transclusion would happen server-side), and allow us to use the same quote in multiple places comfortably. Editing would get a bit trickier, though. But in my understanding, it's not image pages that we have to worry about with regard to the FDL. Of course *we* do have to worry about what fair use means in each individual instance, but the same applies to text. Regards, Erik

Tomasz- Can you say denial? http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AImage_use_policy --- Image description page .... Copyright status * public domain: copyright expired * placed in public domain by photographer * released under the GFDL * released under the GFDL - in response to the boilerplate request for permission, Fred Jones said "That'd be fine" * copyrighted image - the author has given Wikipedia permission to use this image, but third parties may not use it without permission * copyrighted image - may only be used under "fair use" rules Images in these last two categories cannot be distributed under the GFDL license and as such their inclusion in Wikipedia is extremely dubious. It is recommended that you instead link to a page with the image hosted on another server if you cannot obtain explicit permission to redistribute it a GFDL-compatible license. If you do upload "fair use" images here, keep in mind that they may all be removed at some point if the project gets a clear legal opinion on the matter. --- Regards, Erik

Tomasz- See my response to Marco. We should make reasonable efforts to do so, but fortunately, most countries have fair use equivalents. For example, in Germany the use of an image is called a "Großzitat", and currently allowed in scientific works (including popular scientific ones). Our primary concern, however, especially regarding the English Wikipedia, is for US law. Regards, Erik

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote: Are you suggesting that Wikipedia is not educational? Being educational is one of the pillars that helps to establish fair use. Education is not limited to the activities of recognized institutions, but has a much broader meaning. Ec

On 1 Jun 2003, Erik Moeller wrote: Is this policy? I think it's a problematic policy. I've heared Jimbo extol visions about having Wikipedia printed and sent out to the poor and the wretched, once we have enough articles and enough funding. In the US, people can generally buy themselves their own encyclopedias. :) -- Daniel

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote: I don't think it's at all clear that including "fair use" content in a GFDL article has any material impact on GFDL compliance. I have yet to see anyone who wants to take that argument to the logical conclusion, i.e. that no GFDL article can quote even one sentence from any copyrighted source. May an article on Tom Clancy quote a line from one of his books? May an article on Star Wars discuss the line "Use the force, Luke?" Such quoting is normally done under the "fair use" convention. I do support making it easy for people in most countries to be able to redistribute Wikipedia, but of course it is not possible nor desirable to attempt to comply with *every* law of *every* country. --Jimbo

Marco- Good. Do you agree that removing quotes from Wikipedia is not an option? I think they are compatible if they are separately licensed. They mey also be compatible if they are combined, but that is not my understanding of the FDL and of fair use. Actually, I do not consider it very ambiguous at all. The FDL makes no reference to linked materials, period. Therefore linked materials are separate works. Yes. What most people expect is that Wikipedia is free as in beer. We surprise them when we tell them that 90%+ of it are also free as in speech. We should clarify that we allow limited fair use of materials, and that the different components of an article (text, images, quotes, sounds) need to be checked separately if one intends to use Wikipedia materials in a way not allowed by fair use law or the local equivalent. Regards, Erik

Tomasz wrote: Hmhm. It should be here somewhere .. ah, there it is: __________________ /| /| | | ||__|| | Please do | / O O\__ NOT | / \ feed the | / \ \ troll | / _ \ \ ______________| / |\____\ \ || / | | | |\____/ || / \|_|_|/ \ __|| / / \ |____| || / | | /| | --| | | |// |____ --| * _ | |_|_|_| | \-/ *-- _--\ _ \ // | / _ \\ _ // | / * / \_ /- | - | | * ___ c_c_c_C/ \C_c_c_c____________ Regards, Erik

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Marco Krohn wrote: Isn't this already too late? You can only dual license copyleft material if all copyright holders agree to it. The people who have posted stuff so far on Wikipedia have posted it under GFDL exclusively. If we want to combine different licenses, we have to track down all contributers for each relevant article, and get their permisson. Otherwise, we're breaking GFDL. And the only way to combine copylefted material with restricted material is by dual licensing (ours would be "GFDL for everyone, Fair Use for wikipedia.org"). (As I understand it.) -- Daniel

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote: I can't believe I'm hearing this. I don't know what to say. I remember reading about how we're going to one day plug all history back into all articles, from the earlier software phases, because if we didn't we would be violating the license terms set by our contributers (GFDL). And now we're just going to brush it all aside? I'm outraged. Yes, this is unrealistic. This is why I said that it is probably too late to begin dual licensing Wikipedia content (except in the case of new articles). The more common sense solution (in that it is a realistic endeavour) is of course to remove all quotes. Frankly, there aren't that many there to begin with. -- Daniel

On Sunday 01 June 2003 23:32, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote: These are good questions. I see it the same way as you do, but Erik claims (at least for images) that these are different pages with a different license that are added together by the server and by that we don't violate the GFDL. So he basically says that he found a loophole in the GFDL which allows mixing free / non-free content. best regards, Marco -- Marco Krohn Theoretical Physics University of Hannover

Marco- The lawyers from the FSF interpret the FDL in the favor of the FSF's ideology. They are not an independent authority. If you want a legal opinion on the FDL, hire a lawyer. Well, do you prefer it if it happens without being reflected in all our policy documents? Because this is currently the case. You may say you are disappointed if Wikipedia is not 100% free in the Stallman-sense. I say I am disappointed if I can no longer quote articles, speeches, scientific papers, and so forth. I say I am disappointed if all the work that has been done in digitizing, converting and collecting small music samples will be abandoned. I say I am disappointed if the picture of the Rumsfeld/ Hussein handshake will be removed because it is copyrighted. I say I am disappointed if the last little freedom that copyright law grants us is taken away not by the content industry, but by overzealous, paranoid Wikipedians. What's next? DRM to protect our content against FDL violations? Wikipedia documents human knowledge. This is impossible without quoting. It is impossible without fair use. An encyclopedia that cannot cite directly what others say is not an encyclopedia. I want Wikipedia to be a free learning resource. If small but important parts that cannot easily be replaced with open content are not freely modifiable because of copyright law, then that is acceptable to me. You, Axel and Brion see a slippery slope -- I and Ray do not see this, and Jimbo is in the middle. That is an improvement, but it is really better to refer specifically to fair use content that can be part of articles, or fair use of images. I'm sorry to say so, but Mr. Stallman does not have any rights to the interpretation of the term "free". I'm sure he is equally sorry about that. Regards, Erik

Marco- I didn't choose the FDL, and I wouldn't. If it wasn't so hard to change licenses, we might have already switched to Creative Commons style copyleft or something similar. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the FDL is unsuitable for online publications. Even the Debian project rejects it. For my own textual projects, I use the public domain. The GNU project should stick to software licenses. Sadly, because of Wikipedia, the FDL will continue to enjoy popularity because people will choose it for their projects in order to be compatible with us. I stand by my words. *Limiting* or *modifying* fair use is debatable. Eliminating it entirely is not. It would be completely paranoid. I think Mr. Wegrzanowski's recent comments illustrate the connection quite well. And from that paranoia, it is only a small step to wanting the security of additional "enforcement". The GNU project with its cult-like ideology and its constant threats against supposed GPL violators reminds me a lot of those who *defend* "intellectual property". I'm not opposed to copyleft per se, but the danger of using copyright against copyright is the same as when playing with fire -- you might start to like it. Sure, you can always rephrase sentences. But information and emotion tends to get lost on the way. You are no longer saying what a person said, you are saying how you understood that person. "I have a dream." Martin Luther King said that he "had a dream". King emphasized that he had a dream. In the middle of his speech, King remarked that he had a dream. King spoke of a dream he had. It was a dream, King said, that motivated him .. It must have been at some point in his sleep that the idea came to him .. King claimed, without presenting evidence, to have a "dream". With tears in his voice and his hands shaking, King spoke valiantly of the dream he had .. Citations become interpretations. That is acceptable in some contexts, especially where purely factual information is concerned. But as a standard for the whole project, it is unprofessional and non-encyclopedic. It is necessary if you want to create an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia documents human knowledge as precisely and accurately as possible. By having a requirement to paraphrase all quotes you lose the ability to do this. I can't believe we're even discussing this. This must be some joke that I fail to understand. <snip> My point is this: If you think that Wikipedia is no longer a "free" encyclopedia because there's some fair use content in there, then you're using an "ideologically pure" definition of free that is not identical to mine, and not identical to the current policy on the English Wikipedia. I have already explained to you in detail why fair use is compatible with the FDL when properly separated. All that remains to be done is to modify the software in accordance with our discussion, and to clarify some policy pages. We may have to build the transclusion feature I mentioned, although I personally don't care enough to do so. "Intellectual property" does not exist, after all. Regards, Erik

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 09:07:32AM +0200, Marco Krohn wrote: GFDL contains basic licensing scheme which Debian fully accepts and some "extensions" that are obiously non-free - invariant sections, front cover texts and back cover texts. GFDL document without those is perfectly ok for Debian.

On Sunday 01 June 2003 14:51, Jimmy Wales wrote: _I_ think this is obvious (and please believe me that I am very happy with being wrong ;-) "fair use" does not allow modifications. GFDL allows that. adding "fair use" content to "fair use" content does not neccessarily result in "fair use" content. GFDL has no such limitations. We will see what FSF answers to that. I have sent an email to the GNU organization and asked them for help on this. As soon as I have their reply I'll post it here. best regards, Marco -- Marco Krohn Theoretical Physics University of Hannover

Erik Moeller wrote: I agree with this approach, but I don't see where we have had problems with the copyright holders themselves. It would be easy to agree to remove this material if the request came from the copyright holder himself. The pressure so=far seems to be coming from people who imagine that something is copyright. To me, an important question is, "Can a copyright exist without a copyright holder?" In a simple case suppose that the apparent copyright holder died intestate last year, with no apparent heir, and not enough in personal assets to warrant probate. Who now owns the copyright? My inclination would be to use borderline material, with an appropriate warning that we will happily remove on request from a properly identified owner. Eclecticology

Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote: A printed edition (or even a CD edition) has been frequently mentioned on people's wish lists. Until people realistically start talking about how to fund such an undertaking, I have a hard time considering the idea as anything more than a pipe-dream. Flagging fair use images is fine, as would flagging all possibly copyright impaired contributions where the situation is uncertain. In a printed edition, the flagged material could then be easily excluded. Coding boxes :-) could work very well for that. Ec

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote: Wikipedia's age can be counted in months, dismissing long term goals as pipe dreams this early on is forgetting the spectacular success Wikipedia has already achieved - who would have believed? As for funding, is it so implausible that some publisher decides to make a printed edition of the best of our articles and sell it for profit? It would be very cheap for him. -- Daniel

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote: No, not until my (or someone else) script is running OK. And after that, you need some way to mass-produce CD, or just let people downloading ISOs. Of course, the CD cannot contain any image (the text articles totally fill it). (hope it does not count as "feeding" :-))) Ciao, Alfio

On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 09:13:08AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: When whole Wikipedia will be included in Linux distros, distributed on CDs, and articles from Wikipedia will be used by hundreds of books and magazines and thousands of web sites, how are you going to do that ? We'd better play safe here. Anything that doesn't allow Debian and other distros distribute Wikipedia in their main section is not acceptable. (That means DFSG and OSI compatibility, and "fair use" is clearly incompatible with these rules, btw. invariant sections/front and back covers etc. of GFDL are also incompatible with DFSG, negotiations with FSF are in process now to fix that problem with GFDL, plain GFDL is DFSG-compatible)

On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 11:33:05AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: They're not "others", lot of "them" are Wikipedians. If everyone had to consult a lawyer before distributing free software, it wouldn't be half as successful as it is now. All major open projects are very serious about legal issues, and none would accept "just a few lines of code" from dubious source. Some are more paranoid (like FSF and Debian), some are less, but there is no single project that would accept code or other content under "fair use", as that's very likely to cause them, their users and their distributors lot of serious legal problems.

[Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l> to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.] Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote: This isn't entirely true; the more paranoid must still check the less paranoid. But Wikipedia needs to make it easy by separating out the "fair use" pics and not claiming any longer that they are being distributed under the GFDL. As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now (hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain). I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon! Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes? -- Toby

--- Erik Moeller &lt;erik_moeller(a)gmx.de&gt; wrote: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vvhtml/vvhome.html No, the precise thing we need is that the copyright holder releases the picture under GFDL. They retain all rights, including the right, protected under GFDL, to be listed as author in perpetuity. And if the New York Times doesn't want to put their newspaper under GFDL, they will still have to pay the copyright holder for the right to print the image. Speaking of rhethoric: inventing a term with a negative connotation for a position you don't like does not advance your argument. Yes, you might think that, and you would be wrong. In the end you end up with a Wikipedia that is such a mess copyright-wise that the goal "freely redistributable" becomes a farce; just another encyclopedia, without really advancing the global situation of "intellectual property". All these I redefine as advantages with my fourth point above :-) In practice, this means: "first ask for GFDL or public domain; if they refuse, ask for special licensing; if they refuse, you most likely can use it anyway." Axel __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com

--- Erik Moeller &lt;erik_moeller(a)gmx.de&gt; wrote: I'm not sure we should assume this before having tried. One could argue that this should actually be pretty cheap: * GFDL materials are useless for most commercial enterprises * if they refuse to release under GFDL, we can always threaten to take it under fair use, which means that they neither get author recognition nor money. I don't either. It's either freely distributable/modifiable or it isn't. If I understood correctly, you argue that quotes are embedded in the text while images are kept in separate files, thus GFDL is not inherited by the photo but is inherited by the quotes. This is incorrect. Derivative work are required to be under GFDL; what constitutes a derivative work is defined by copyright law. The technical detail that text and images are typically kept in separate files is irrelevant; illustrating an article by adding a picture is a classical case of a derivative work. Moving quotes out of the main text and then "including" them somehow is a technical gimmick that doesn't change anything: adding a quote also creates a derivative work. So yes, fair use quotes are technically violations of GFDL, but completely harmless. Nobody wants to change quotes anyway, and fair use quotes are typically minute parts the work they originate from. Even commercial redistributors can use those quotes under fair use. All three of the above are false for images. Axel __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com

--- Erik Moeller &lt;erik_moeller(a)gmx.de&gt; wrote: ...with the intent and expectation that the image and the text be combined into a whole by the user's browser. It's a technical detail that this combining is done by the browser rather than by the server - had we used PDF rather than HTML as our distribution medium, then the combining would take place on the server. In other words: this would be laughed out of court. It is neither, since short textual quotes are quite different from images in at least two respects relevant to fair use. 1) Quotes are typically a tiny fraction of the whole work, while images are typically 100% of the whole work. 2) There is no functioning market for the rights in short quotes, but there is a functioning market for the rights in images. Now, I don't think Wikipedia is at any risk whatsoever: if somebody complains about an image, we simply take it down. We don't have money, so we won't get sued. The downstream users of our materials however may not share these luxuries, and in addition may have commercial interests which weakens their fair use defense considerably. In effect our fair use images shut out large classes of potential users of the encyclopedia. Axel __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com

--- Erik Moeller &lt;erik_moeller(a)gmx.de&gt; wrote: Actually, what matters is the meaning of "derivative work", which is defined in copyright law. If illustrating an article with a picture creates a derivative work, GFDL applies automatically to the whole. That does not make good policy: Wikipedia contributors have zero incentive to do this research. They want to illustrate an article, and quick. Finding the copyright holder and sending an email to ask whether there is a functioning market for digital reproduction of this picture would be way to much hassle. Should all fair-use pictures without this proof be deleted? "The free encyclopedia", as in "freely modifiable and redistributable", not "free for non-commercial use". Axel __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com

(This policy stuff should really be over on wikipedia-l, not here, so I am cc:'ing). Toby Bartels wrote: It doesn't seem doubtful to me. See Kelley v. ArribaSoft on thumbnails: http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/IP/copyright/kelly_v_arriba_soft.htm And also: "On the other hand, in Nunez v. Caribbean International News Corp.,*fn22 the First Circuit found that copying a photograph that was intended to be used in a modeling portfolio and using it instead in a news article was a transformative use." It's a very complicated issue, and although I've spent many hours reading court cases, I still can't say with any certainty on lots of questions. But the album cover example seems pretty squarely fair use. This I agree with completely. Also, *where possible*, and I think this is more cases than people commonly realize, we should be replacing fair use images with pure GNU FDL images. --Jimbo

Jimmy- I believe this argument is fallacious, since most of our instances of fair use are in cases where it isn't realistically possible to get a "really free" source. We're not going to put up an image of a famous building as fair use, because we can get a Wikipedian to make a photograph. But we can't make free photographs of deceased celebrities in any appealing state. Of course, we can try to get permissions (and we can, and should, try to do so with all of our fair use images), but our main problem with doing so is that we effectively require the copyright holders to relicense their works under the FDL or to put them in the public domain. Most people aren't going to do either. Regards, Erik

Axel Boldt wrote: I don't think that that's the way to go. Once we start paying for material, the nature of the project would change drastically. Ec

Axel- ^reasonably Regards, Erik

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 09:46:53PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote: On Polish Wikipedia they would be immediately deleted. "Fair use" is well known to be incompatible with free software - it gives very limited rights. Please detele all such images, so Wikipedia can stay free.

Brion Vibber wrote: I agree completely. Whenever we have a tough decision between expedience and redistributability _in the long run_, we should choose redistributability. I am of the opinion, though not to the point of pushing strongly for enforcement just now, that it would be best if we removed a great many images that are currently in wikipedia. They are o.k. for us to use, on account of so-called "fair use", but they are not GNU-free, and this should trouble us. --Jimbo

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Brion Vibber wrote: Being static, lots of the dynamic stuff and special pages didn't need to be on the topbar :-) I'll save this for when/if it becomes a real problem The new version of the script (not online yet) produces a dump that, according to Nero, can be written on a 650MB cd. The main reasons are a smaller html template and the elimination of redirects (but they are still present for searches). So I wasn't the only one thinking about this :) Some days ago I did a little Google search, but found nothing. I'm also *sure* that someone has already written this. Again, I'll postpone it to a future version. I should point out that the main reason for size bloat is the proliferation of small files. Combined with the 2048 bytes cluster size for cd-rom filesystems, it means that each article uses at least 2K, and an average of 1K is wasted on bigger files. Just counting bytes, the html version is around 490MB. So maybe some way to bundle files together (maybe using frames and #anchors, or now-you-see-it-now-you-don't effects in Javascript :) could pay off. Hmm, this seems neat. Now how many different words are there in the average Wikipedia dump? :)) And, a frameset would be necessary as in the next option, barring some black magic communication between Javascript pages. This is what I was thinking to do as the next step. The include() can be hacked up, but memory would just add up to the original size. Some neat frameset should do the trick. Next version online soon :-) Ciao, Alfio