[Foundation-l] Offering Wikibooks content for sale

Tue Jul 4 00:47:55 UTC 2006

Quick comments:

1) Both http://www.lulu.com/content/346504 and the PDF attribute the
content to "Wikimedia Foundation Inc. & Contributing authors". Which
of the content is actually claimed to be copyrighted by the WMF?
Normally all content is under the GFDL; there is no transfer of
copyright to the WMF during the editing process. If content by the WMF
is used (the logos come to mind), explicit permission is necessary,
but I did not see any such content. I suspect the user simply
misunderstood how copyright on Wikimedia projects works, in which case
the WMF should be removed from the authorship credit.

2) The problem with a proliferation of unofficial links is that the
user who has control over the print on demand account also controls
the markup, and can change it any time. For this reason, an official
solution should be sought as quickly as possible. As James has noted,
the problem parallels strongly our existing CafePress shop at:

http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia

In fact, CafePress also offers print on demand services. The shop is
controlled by the Foundation. It would seem best to me to authorize
trusted users to manage  print on demand services on behalf of the
Foundation, and to make sure that all proceeds (if any) go directly to
the organization. Perhaps the small SP subcommittee on static content

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_subcommittees/Static_content

could be expanded to deal with this problem, at least until a better
organizational model that involves the projects and languages directly
is found.

Erik