[Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects

Sat May 29 23:24:20 UTC 2004

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Wikinews would have two primary goals:
> * summarizing news
> * original reporting
> 
> Wikipedia does none of the latter, so the only potential for redundancy is  
> with news summarizing, currently done on Wikipedia on the [[current  
> events]] page. 

It also happens in actual articles. [[Nick Berg]] and [[Abu Ghraib prisoner
abuse reports]] for example. But I do see a distinction: Articles on Wikipedia
would synthesize the whole topic while Wikinews articles would just cover the
breaking news on that topic. However I'm skeptical that the average user will
grep this distinction, resulting in a content fork for recent history.
Wikipedia's ability to be up-to-date is one of the most cited good things about
us and we should be "very" careful not to jeopardize that. 

Dividing recent history update work between two projects does not seem to be a
good idea - unless true Wikijournalism develops. If and when we get a problem
with people giving first hand reports, then we can seriously think about
starting Wikinews, IMO. I'm sure that will happen someday, but I don't think
that will be a problem until Wikipedia.org is in the top 100 or so list of
websites on the Internet. We should by then have dozens of Wikimedians in each
large city of the world and thus have a large potential pool of journalists on
the ground.  

>...
> > But placing Wikinews text under a
> > license that is incompatible with Wikipedia is way over the top.
> 
> You appear to be under the misconception that a license different from the  
> FDL would automatically mean license incompatibility. While this is, to  
> some extent, true in the direction ''FDL text'' => ''text in another  
> license'' (because the FDL requires that all derivative works are FDL- 
> licensed), it is not necessarily true in the direction ''text in another  
> license'' => ''FDL text''.

Free content is not free when it cannot be freely copied back and forth between
the source and the derivative work. 

> ...
> This specifically addresses your concern of using Wikinews content to  
> update Wikipedia articles. Given that Wikinews is not intended to be an  
> encyclopedia, I think that background information from Wikipedia is best  
> provided using links, which is not a problem.

This would be different from a great many news articles I read - the good ones
always include background information. 

> ....
> I think you overestimate the flexibility of the Free Software Foundation  
> :-). 

Jimmy already mentioned he was going to have a meeting with them on this topic.

> Of course the "any higher version number" clause of the FDL allows us  
> to make some improvements in future versions of the license, but these  
> improvements depend entirely on how much the FSF is willing to accommodate  
> our position. Given that the FSF has a significant number of documents  
> licensed under the FDL which would be affected by such a change, the  
> resistance to drastic changes - which are needed to address the problems  
> of the FDL - will be strong. Keep in mind that the FDL was originally  
> designed for print documents, and that existing print documents by the  
> FSF, if they do not refer to a specific version number of the FDL, will  
> also be affected by any changes.

That is why I am proposing the creation of a GNU Free Content License that
invariant-free GNU FDL text can be migrated to. Then the only change in the GNU
FDL 2.0 that would need to be made is a clause stating that: 

"Any document licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License version 2.0 or
any later version that does not contain Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts,
or Back-Cover Texts, can be licensed under the GNU Free Content License version
1.0 or any later version."  

And the GNU FCL would be a stripped down and simplified rewrite of the GNU FDL
that would not have any provision for the much-maligned Invariant Sections,
Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts and would be compatible with the
Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license (along with other changes). 

> Nevertheless, this is of course a road which we shall travel. Its mere  
> existence should, however, not preclude us from contemplating the  
> exploration of other paths.

Nothing wrong with exploring new options but old objections will still keep
coming up and will often still be relevant. 

>...
> By the definition of the Free Software Foundation, that is correct.  
> However, that definition is not the only one. In fact, most people have an  
> entirely different understanding of "free content."

I think it would be fair to say that most people don't understand the concept
at all.  

> Indeed, and the main question of copyleft vs. public domain / attribution- 
> only licenses is "What is more important to me - enlarging the body of  
> content available under a free license, or making sure that as many people  
> as possbile will be exposed to the content in question?"  The possibility  
> that we may want to answer this question differently for some Wikimedia  
> projects than for others should not be discounted out of hand.

The point is to expose as many people as possible to the content, yes. But that
can only be done by having it under a free content license. If we release into
the public domain, then work on the content gets forked and improvements made
to the forks can not be back-ported to the original. Then, unless the person
tracks down each version fork, they are exposed to *less* content. 

> Make no mistake - the originally free content will always remain free in  
> both instances.

I'm thinking of the larger picture here. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/ 