[Wikipedia-l] What did Richard Stallman say?

Sat Feb 21 05:14:30 UTC 2004

Richard Stallman wrote:

> (Jimmy Wales wrote: 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.)
>
>This is easily done, but doesn't achieve the goal of building a free
>encyclopedia.  There is no help for it; to make a free encyclopedia,
>one must stick to materials that are free.
>
I totally agree.

>(Jimbo again: 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.)
>
>When applicable, this may be a good solution.
>
>(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.)
>
>This is permitted in the sense that it won't violate the GFDL.
>
No disrespect intended, but as far as I know, RMS is not a lawyer. By 
promoting the concept of copyleft, he has certainly had a significant 
effect on law, but he did have the help of a lawyer, Eben Moglen, to 
write the licenses. I would not use this as a legal interpretation. For 
one thing, I think RMS would concede he's not an expert in the details 
of international copyright law, though he may have learned more about it 
than most. Also, may I point out that in software and programming, his 
real area of expertise, fair use is a much less significant concept than 
for us. So I don't think we should count on RMS to tell us when it's 
"applicable" that fair use is "a good solution", especially with the 
non-US implications.

RMS is a good person to ask about the spirit of GFDL, and that is 
important. To keep that spirit, as he says, we should use free images if 
we want to make a free encyclopedia.

--Michael Snow