[Wikipedia-l] Re: What would Richard Stallman say?

Sun Feb 22 08:24:21 UTC 2004

Michael Snow wrote:
>My criticism was primarily out of concern 
>that people might read your statement as  
>reflecting the actual state of the law, 

Well IANAL but I do often agree with them and their reasoning. 

>especially coming from such a widely 
>respected source. 

I wish everybody would just take my statements at face value and not add
special significance (good or bad) to what I say just because I said it.  It
would make life much easier - especially when I happen to be wrong. 

>My point is that Wikipedia's copyright, when it 
>incorporates fair use materials, is limited to uses 
>that qualify as fair under copyright law.  This does 
>not affect our ability to protect the copyright in 
>Wikipedia  content. However, it does severely  
>limit our ability to license other people to use 
>that content. 

Not if their use would also be considered fair. 

>When we use material under  
>fair use, the GFDL does nothing to force downstream 
>users to stick to the same use. In fact, the GFDL 
>clearly allows them to make many other uses of 
>the material, quite a few of which are highly unlikely 
>to qualify as fair uses. 

Which uses? If they change the article in a substantial way, then they will
have to make an assessment on whether or not those changes changed the fair use
status of the content we marked as fair use. We do not need to be overly
concerned by the *possible* violation of the law by third parties. 

Saying 'all content is available under terms of the GNU FDL' affects the
copyright status of a fair use thumbnail the same way as it affect the
copyright status of a fair use quote: not at all.  

If the article we give them is legal for them to use as-is, then that is all we
should be concerned about. Thus the need to tag images based on their status
and to provide different database dumps. 

>Ultimately, the GFDL and fair use are incompatible. 

No they are not - not any more than any other set of license terms. It doesn't
matter what license terms you have on a work - if you strip away everything but
the fair use content then the use is no longer fair (whatever the license). The
fact that the GNU FDL is involved is irrelevant. 

Otherwise we could not even have small quotes from copyrighted works. That is
an absurd notion, IMO. 

-- mav

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