[Foundation-l] Comment on Copyright Orphans

Tue Apr 19 06:46:24 UTC 2005

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> I agree with Anthere that we perhaps should submit something 
> representing WMF, but it's hard to know what kind of official position 
> we should take   In my own submission I certainly could not go so far 
> as to state that I was representing the Foundation.  They were 
> entirely my own opinions.  What points should we be makeing?

I was thinking about this a bit, and I'm not that sure it strongly 
impacts us, especially in a way that's easy to convincingly explain.  
The major thing Wikimedia is known for is Wikipedia, which really is 
unlike most of what's been written in the past, whether in or out of 
copyright.  Sure, we imported en masse some 1911 EB articles, but even 
if all copyright disappeared entirely, the current revision of EB would 
need substantial work to be turned into good Wikipedia articles.  I'm 
not sure it would buy us that much over just getting some more writers.  
And with images, we can either generally take images ourselves 
(something that's happening increasingly often), or rely on fair use for 
historically important images that are still under copyright.  There are 
a few cases where asking for permission would be helpful, but in general 
an orphaned work is no worse from our perspective than a work that's 
non-orphaned but where a copyright holder simply refuses to grant us a 
GFDL or CC license to it.  Wikisource probably suffers the most direct 
impact, but again, orphaned works aren't a unique problem---copyrighted 
but non-orphaned works are no better.

I get the impression that the case the copyright office is most 
interested in is one that doesn't impact us at all: The case where 
someone is willing to pay a copyright holder for a license to use their 
work (e.g. for a film adaptation of a book), but cannot do so because 
the copyright holder is unable to be located.

-Mark