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

Sun Feb 22 17:14:52 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:

> 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.
>
Well, you've had disagreements with at least two so far. Though of 
course, lawyers frequently disagree with each other, too. It's sort of 
an occupational requirement.

>>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.
>
I doubt that's completely possible for you anymore here. You're not 
Jimbo, but most regular users probably know who you are. I expect Jimbo 
probably avoids expressing his personal opinions in some situations, 
just because people might attach too much weight to them.

>>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. 
>
I consider it both relevant and different from other licenses. The GFDL 
is a form of copyleft, and in my opinion, you can't copyleft something 
if you don't own the copyright. We don't own the copyright to our fair 
use materials (not when considered separately), yet we appear to be 
licensing their use under copyleft. It's quite different than if we were 
licensing our content under terms that were designed to limit everybody 
else to fair use as well. However, if you feel that our disclaimer of 
warranties shifts the obligation to downstream users, making it their 
job to determine what they can legally copy, that's a reasonable 
position to take.

>Otherwise we could not even have small quotes from copyrighted works.
>
As I have pointed out in some of my other posts, there are other legal 
justifications for quotation besides fair use under US copyright law. I 
believe we should shift our reliance to Article 10 of the Berne 
Convention, which specifically allows quotation of published works. We 
would have to make sure we mention the source and the name of the 
author. I think this can pretty much resolve the issue for text, and an 
argument can be made to apply it to images and sounds as well. In any 
case, the Berne Convention has much wider international acceptance than 
fair use.

--Michael Snow
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