[Wikide-l] Re: use of ESA-images in Wikipedia

Sa Okt 30 10:35:18 UTC 2004

Hallo,

Hier mein zweiter Brief an die ESA, diesmal auf Englisch. Bitte konstruktive 
Kritik, bevor ich ihn abschicke. Englisch ist schließlich nicht meine 
Mutersprache. ;-)

Grüße,
Daniel Arnold (Arnomane)

----

Dear Mrs. Imbert-Vier,

First of all thank you for your answer.

> Further to your request, we only authorise you to use the ESA views to
> illustrate your articles concerning the ESA's missions in your encyclopedia
> Wikipedia for educationnal purposes.
> Of course, for each ESA's view used, the complete copyright has be
> mentioned (ESA+illustrator name).
>
> We do not authorise you to offer to your clients the possibility to
> download, copy, modify the ESA's files and to use them for other purposes.

At first I have a technical quesition to your conditions: How can we meet your 
demand not offer the possibility of downloading the images, because for using 
them at Wikipedia they have to be displayed in a browser and thatfor 
downloaded from Wikipedia-servers.

Here is also an example link how an image is provided in Wikipedia by 
WikiMedia-Software ( it is a special page which can be embedded in 
text-pages):

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Smart1.jpg

Despite that these usage conditions are exactly causing the problem I had 
described in my german mail, because they are contrary to the principles of 
Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, meaning that it content has to be free 
according the definitions of the GNU Free Documentation license
( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#FDL ). Note: Free doesn't mean at 
no cost, but free in the sense of freedom.

The main principles of this license are:

1) Credit to the orgininal authors has to be given
2) Freedom of usage: Everyone can use the work for every purpose.
3) Freedom of modification: Everyone is allowed to modify the work according 
to his/her own needs.
4) Freedom of distribution: Everyone is allowed to distribute the work 
(original and modified) at the price he/she likes, provided that every 
interested person gets a transparent (open data format) machine readable copy 
of the work and that for modifications/derivative work the same rights are 
given to everyone.

Note: Personal rights (of persons shown in images) and trademark rights are 
untouched by this license.

Many ESA-images were uploaded by several people at Wikipedia in the false 
assumption, that your conditions are compatible to the GNU-FDL, which is 
clearly not the case.

So we have unluckily only two options:
a) deleting all ESA images in Wikipedia, although Wikipedias goal is education 
and the Foundation of Wikipedia is a non profit organisation, simply because 
of the far reaching rights we give to everyone (and of course we deliberately 
don't want to restrict them).
b) the images can be released by ESA at conditions compatible to the GNU-FDL.

Of course b) is only a wish not a demand. You are the copyright owner. You can 
do whatever you want with your content.

If we have to choose a) many peeople using and enhancing Wikipedia would be 
very disappointed, because the articles (as the ones I was pointing out in my 
previous mail) would suffer a dramatic loose of astethetical and 
informational quality - and of course there would be a loose of balance in the 
content presented by Wikipedia, since the NASA allows the use of it images 
within the public domain.

If you didn't already get in contact with this project: Wikipedia is a large 
community driven project (founded by an Open Source enthusiast called Jimbo 
Wales from the US) that has mostly the same and in some aspects already lager 
dimensions as Microsoft Encarta or Encyclopaedia Britannica and has gained 
larger media interest in the recent past. Wikipedia has at the moment more 
than one million articles in all languages (only German pages already more 
than 150'000, there also exists a large french subproject at 
http://fr.wikipedia.org ) and belongs to the top 500 of visited internet 
pages according to independent analysis.

Wikipedia is the (already successful) attempt to port the idea of free 
software (for example the famous Linux operating system, which is also used 
in many places by ESA) to literature.

So would it be possible to release the ESA images within the Public Domain or 
the GNU-FDL? ESA would for sure win with this step.

However your answer is, we will respect your copyright (and act according to 
our principles).

Best regards,
Daniel Arnold
-a free willy Wikipedia contributor