On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 11:51:22 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
*Snip*
Should it be free for commercial redistribution?
Yes.
*Snip*
Well, for anyone to commercially redistribute wikipedia, they would have to go through and
remove all of the non-GNU copyrighted material. They could rely on the current community
created labeling scheme to remove any labeled free-use images, but there is always the off
chance of an image that wasn't labeled properly would stay in. This means that to
commercially redistribute wikipedia, someone would have to look through every image, and
make sure they are not copyrighted. Now, maybe this is desirable to some wikipedians, to
make it harder for someone to profit off of our work. However, I personally think that it
would benefit our cause for us to have commercial distributions of our work; it would help
spread the word of our cause. In any case, I think it would be beneficial for us to come
up with a better system for including non-GNU copyrighted material. We never know who in
the future is going to want to use our content, and it is going to be much easier to
separate the non-GNU material out now than 10 years from now.
--
Michael Becker