[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] contents under education/information licenses

Tue Nov 21 18:16:54 UTC 2006

Delphine Ménard wrote:
> On 11/21/06, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> What are the odds of getting interested Wikipedians in to take the
>> pictures instead? Contractors cost money, getting pictures taken for
>> free in exchange for free licensing seems like a better deal for ESA.
>> Lest one is concerned about amateur-quality work, I suspect that if ESA
>> were to publicly announce inside access for ten photographers, unpaid
>> but credited by name, they would have more than enough applications to
>> be able to accept only the best.
>>     
>
> Right, I am not soooo sure that the ESA (or any other organisation,
> NASA included, for that matter) will let any random Wikipedian hop on
> the next satellite to take pictures of <insert name of planet here>.
> I'd love too, but hey, I don't think this is going to happen any time
> soon.
>   
But those external contractors aren't on the satellite either - I 
suppose there is an interesting legal question as to ownership of the 
raw bits coming from an onboard camera, vs the final processed image. My 
guess is that it simply may not have occurred to anyone in the 
bureaucracy that there might be plenty of talented people who could do 
the processing themselves, in much the same way that open-source 
software projects, SETI at home, etc, are already doing successfully.
> I believe you will also understand the importance of monitoring what
> pictures get in and out concerning satellites, space shuttles and
> other highly technological objects.
>   
You mean to filter out the photos of alien spacecraft? :-)
>> I also think WP could do more to cynically play on European chauvinism
>> than it has so far. 1/2 :-) A public statement by Jimbo, saying
>> something like "we will not accept unfree ESA images in WP, and while we
>> don't want WP to present a US-only view of space exploration, it's up to
>> the Europeans to fix this", would likely get reported widely, and
>> hopefully put some pressure on ESA to change what is at best a sloppy
>> practice.
>>     
>
> Let us not jump to conclusions too fast here. :-)
> What you call "European chauvinism" I will rather call "lack of
> means", "lack of human ressources to write the right contracts with
> the n number of national laws involved in the launching of this or
> that satellite and the building of this or that camera" etc. There are
> reasons for the ESA and other organisations not being able to release
> their pictures under a free license and they go far beyond a manichean
> "good people who release in the public domain what they produce with
> public money" vs "bad people who want to keep stuff for themselves". I
> don't think "pressure" as you put it, is the way to go.
>   
Certainly there are plenty of cultural and historical issues involved. 
The PD-ness of the US govt material has always seemed to me a little bit 
accidental, starting from the logical principle of not making taxpayers 
pay twice for things they already bought, but it they had really thought 
through all the possible consequences, they might have introduced some 
kind of a special license at some point. But the ESA really does risk 
their legacy vanishing in the same way that much copyrighted material 
from the 20th century is vanishing - would European taxpayers be OK with 
that if they knew it was going on?
>
> Now let me try and shift the debate a little here. Let us consider
> that the ESA, or whatever other organisation, comes up with a licence
> of their own. Let us imagine they allow free use of their images (in
> our free sense) *except* for political propaganda. Would that in any
> way be an acceptable thing to go by? Or is that definitely something
> we can't accept? It's a real question, I have no real opinion about
> this.
>   
An interesting point! I think you'd have a tough time bounding 
"political propaganda" in a globally-satisfactory way. After all, in the 
US almost any climatological or meteorological data is now being 
employed in the intense political debate on global warming. Even the 
most evenhanded of WP articles on the subject is accused of promoting 
one or another agenda, so with an ESA limitation on political 
propaganda, satellite-produced maps of ocean temperature and such would 
have to come from NASA - and in these partisan days, would you want to 
trust them as a sole source?

Free licenses generally steer clear of trying to place limits on the 
purpose of an image's use, because it's just so hard to define precisely.
> What I understand David was trying to say here is that maybe there is
> a mid-term agreement that can be reached, somewhere along the path.
> Are the Organisation X images worth us being just a tad less free (no
> political use of the images), are they not? It's a difficult question,
> but one that is worth debating.
>   
I'm a little skeptical of the interim agreement idea, because that's 
exactly how we got so infested with bogus fair use images. The original 
"Salinger is too hard to get a photo of" policy somehow got twisted into 
acceptance of unfree high school photos because the uploader was too 
lazy to go outside and take a picture with his camera phone - and now 
anybody enforcing the original policy is met with howls and wailing and 
predictions of doom.

A fun idea might be to accept them for one year on a trial basis.  If 
the ESA bureaucracy hasn't made any visible effort on their side in that 
time, do a mass-deletion.

Stan