Ops, sorry,
I realize that this was not posted to the list.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alex R." <alex756(a)nyc.rr.com>
To: "Brion Vibber" <brion(a)pobox.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 10:58 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikilists and GDFL
From: "Brion Vibber"
<brion(a)pobox.com>
Alex, every version of every page that has been
released under the FDL
through this project *has been released under the FDL*.
Has been? So when it was released it could be used and that use is
covered, but not someone coming later and picking and choising
out of the page histories.
redistributed by anyone who received it under
that license, and
Wikipedia's servers continue to redistribute them under that license as
part of Wikipedia.
The link is not stable, they would have to change the link once it
goes into the page history. Does anyone do that, i.e. this page is
from a Wikipedia article named: [[fair use]]. Not, this page is
stored in the page history. Didn't I read someone someone suggesting
that stable URLs are very important to content continuity? That does
not occur once a page goes into history, the URL changes at that point.
I think that is very significant.
It is the very essence of what we're trying
to do that material from the
project can be reused and redistributed under that same free license. To
claim that this should be taken away after another revision has been
made is to pervert the system, to demolish the community editing system,
to strangle the right to fork, to pull the rug of liberty from under the
feet of reuse.
But a Wiki is about change and collaboration. I think that such a
literal view of free resuse means that Wikipedia can for ever be
associated with outdated and poorly edited pages. No! The point
is that if someone finds a Wikipedia page they can change it and
improve it, not decide to make fun of us (or hail to the glory of the
by gone age when pages were really good). They have to re-edit
that is what Wikipedia is about, not linking to old page histories.
In short, I can only assume we're
misunderstanding each other badly,
because I can't believe anyone would try to make the argument that
legitimately edited, publically released, FDL-licensed past revisions
are no longer redistributable under the terms of the license that they
have been released to the world under. That would be to argue against
everything this project stands for.
Publically released? Not everythiing on the internet is "publicly
released".
True it is all available and the liberal availability of fair use on the
internet means that people can get prior versions, but does that mean
that they are the authorized versions? The GFDL requires that the
current version of an article some how be acknowleged. I think that
is pretty clear.
Also we are not talking about third parties. Most of my argument
was about the duties of the Wikipedia community amongst its
fellow coauthor community and the obligation we have towards each
other in relation to the public. There is an us and them. We have
contributed we share a coauthorship bond, we have duties towards
each other. Third parties do not, we should not encourage them to
act in a way that compromises our collaboration.
I think that when someone uses a page history file they might have
a strong case for fair use, but the more I think about it the more I
think that so doing they are violating both the spirit of Wikipedia
and the letter of the GFDL.
The arguments about it being _unfair_ to later
contributors to not use
their work don't make any sense to me, and appear to explicitly reject
what the project's use of the FDL license explicitly embraces: the
The key word is develop. The GDFL was written for manuals. It was
not envisioned to be used in a collaborative social software content
collaboration project. Anyone could read lots of things into the license,
as both you have I have done. I think we have both demonstrated
that there are lots of problems with the GFDL. What should
have been done is someone should have written a license that was
clearly written with such a collaborate project in mind, but now it
is not possible to do so as the license is permanently grafted onto
more than 150,000 articles (and that is in English only).
ability to reuse and if desired separately
develop free encyclopedia
materials under a free license.
Even without the FDL people can develop separate encylopedias.
Encyclopedias are compendiums of knowledge. Anyone can take
the knowledge of Wikipedia and re-use it. I see no problem with that
that is allowed under copyright law, fair use is a lot more flexible than
I think most people here understand. Copyright law on the internet
is fairly weak because it is so easy to copy materials and most
people who post on the internet would have a difficult time in policing
their copyright, even if they assert copyright they use it anyway.
I think that if you look at most of the downstream users of
Wikipedia material you will find that they do not comply with the
letter of the FDL anyway; if some contributor wanted to they could
probably get these materials yanked off the internet because their
rights are being violated under the license.
I have not found one cite where they do cite at least five
of the principal authors of the material on their site, they do not have
any clear link back to the Wikipedia page that they have reproduced
(though most link back to Wikipedia, they have confused Wikipedia
with all of its diverse contributors). Even within Wikipedias there
are many translations of articles. These translations are violations of
the GFDL because they do not respect the original authors' rights as
stated under the GFDL.
The text of the GDFL is a complex license that many people do not
understand and do not know how to apply, that is pretty clear.
I once had some clients (software developers) who entered into
a contract with an information producer. They all downloaded some
contract they had found on the internet. Both my clients and the
producer had no idea what the contract meant, they had assumed it
applied to them because they heard that the site that posted the
contracts was used by software developers. The only problem was
that the factual circumstances differed much from what software
developers did. The result? No one knew what their rights were,
or their responsibilities and not even lawyers could straighten it out.
Lawyers are not miracle workers, when something is confusing or
wrong, confusing, inappropriate or poorly drafted the lawyers
cannot necessarily fix it.
Alex756