[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Thu Feb 19 15:50:59 UTC 2004

We are faced with an issue of convenience versus freedom when we talk
about licensing images.  Because we are a nonprofit charitable
organization with an educational mission, we can easily get non-free
licenses to use images.  Because we are a nonprofit charitable
organization with an educational mission, we can make heavy use of the
doctrine of "fair use" in the US.

But should we?

One of the things that our reliance on these alternatives does is work
to undermine our broader mission, by reducing the incentive for the
creation of free alternatives.  It's more work to get those free
alternatives, but the result will be worthwhile, I think.

We can set aside most of the licensing and legal issues, because I
think we're fine there.  Clause 7 of the license permits us to combine
independent works, even proprietary works, and this clearly includes
aggregating images and articles stored on the same server.  For fair
use, the license isn't implicated or violated in any way.

So I think resting our rejection of licensed and most fair use images
on that argument is mistaken.  I don't think that argument is valid,
but more importantly, I think that argument is too hyper-technical and
legalistic, implicitly assuming that it's o.k. for us to do it if the
license says it is o.k.

The moral argument is the one that matters.  Should we make use of
materials that are available only to us because of our special
circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?

I think we all know what Richard Stallman would say, and I for one
will agree with him completely.  The Wikimedia Foundation should be a
beacon of what is possible with copyright freedom, and we should not
allow anyone to ever point at our work and say "Yeah, they talk the
big talk about free licensing, but what would their site be without
all those proprietary licensed images and fair use exceptions?"

If that means less images for now, then it means less images for now.
It also means that we have a very strong incentive to develop free
alternatives.

--Jimbo