[Foundation-l] Instant Commons : INCORRECT

Thu Jun 8 19:21:50 UTC 2006

Hoi,
For your information, there is no point in having a public wrangle
about InstantCommons, it does not help if anything it makes people
increasingly angry. It also leads to a situation where people refuse
to communicate and cooperate. From my perspective, I will need to
cooperate with people in the Wikimedia Foundation be they the Board or
the Special Projects Committee. When I have a beef with either of them
I will not have a public row.

I do however want to address Amgine's point. There is one important
difference between Commons and Napster. On Commons people are actively
engaged in ensuring that content is properly labeled and licensed.
This is in marked contrast with Napster where the defence was that
they were only providing a service and that it was not THEIR content.

Given that everything is done to make Commons free of copyrighted
articles and given that Commons explicitly aims to be a public
resource for Free material. It is stupid to suggest that this cannot
be because not everything has been 100% checked. Either it is a public
resource or it is not. You cannot have it both ways.

What InstantCommons does is nothing more than make the material that
is there as a public resource available in a convenient way.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 6/8/06, amgine at saewyc.net <amgine at saewyc.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-06 at 16:42 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> On 6/8/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > 4. Although copyright concerns are mentioned, they don't seem to be
> > > explored in depth. Commons has a huge amount of copyright violations
> > > on it today.
> >
> > Then they should be deleted. InstantCommons is a manual,
> > user-initiated process. Commons has no legal responsibility to stop
> > users of other wikis from copying images from Commons, whether it is
> > by means of manually downloading or uploading, or by setting their
> > wiki up for IC and initiating an IC transfer process. The copyright
> > cleanup script is a convenient thing we can provide, and by no means a
> > legal necessity.
> >
> Isn't this the Napster defense? And didn't that fail to convince the US
> Supreme Court? Wouldn't the failure to address copyright concerns result
> in Commons potentially being used as a file sharing service?
>
> Amgine
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