[Foundation-l] Offering Wikibooks content for sale

Tue Jul 4 12:59:32 UTC 2006

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>Of all the books to come out of print-on-demand, this one is possibly the  
>most problematic. I am certainly not a lawyer but, as I see it, not only is it  
>using the name of the Foundation without the explicit permission of the  
>Foundation (and hence, in violation of  our trademark), it is attributing  the 
>content to the Foundation. This, in turn, could make us liable for any  copyvios 
>in the book (text and images). Despite numerous requests from Print on  Demand 
>publishers (including Lulu), the Foundation has consistently avoided such  an 
>arrangement for precisely these reasons.
> 
>Furthermore, the content was developed as a result of a grant made to the  
>Foundation with the stated goal of creating *free* content. After considerable  
>discussions with them, we have made it clear that we intend to keep the books  
>online and not take them to print. This is precisely what we said we will 
>*not*  do, and it is timed perfectly to coincide with negotiations to get a  
>considerably larger grant from that same foundation to expand the  Wikijunior 
>project. 
>
I guess this is the free as in beer vs. free as in liberty argument. 
 The content certainly is free in the sense that it is available to 
anybody, and we certainly havn't granted any exclusive publication 
rights to a particular user.  In this sense, I have no real understand 
of why this is such a problem, nor why it would affect any sort of 
negotiations.  If it was promised to be free as in beer and a grant 
given to be able to do that, you should involve the community who is 
developing the content and let us know exactly what was promised and how 
we can get stuff like this published in a more productive manner. 
 Besides, the GFDL prohibits restricting publication in precisely the 
manner that you are complaining about here.

The only real issue is if a link will be on a project page or not, and 
to offer a strong policy on how to accomplish this.  By simply 
prohibiting links of this nature IMHO is the wrong way to approach this 
issue, and this is something that the WMF needs to deal with and allow 
at least some sort of path to accomplish the goal:  selling content in 
some sort of on-line bookstore with links on project pages.  At the 
moment there is no path other than what this user has accomplished.

> 
>This is not commendable. It is the bad result of people acting unilaterally  
>on behalf of the Foundation without fully understanding the implications of 
>what  they are doing.
> 
>Danny
> 
>
This user is not acting unilaterally on behalf of the WMF, but is trying 
to be bold and acting on good faith to acomplish a goal that has been 
dismissed on this list in the past, where comments encouraging this 
specific kind of behavior have been offered and no rebuttal by people 
like yourself until the actions occured.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning