[Foundation-l] Offering Wikibooks content for sale

Wed Jul 5 14:53:19 UTC 2006

On 7/4/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Brad Patrick wrote in part:
>
> >Licensing others to publish, from
> >the WMF perspective is not a big step, and is to WMF's great financial
> >advantage.
> >
> snip
>
>
>
> Assuming the content must be licensed from the WMF is a violation of the
> FDL and it could be argued an attempt to exploit the name brand
> recognition of the GNU FDL without meeting the responsibilities of its
> use.

I have never suggested such a thing.

It seems pretty easy to me to delineate that the trademarks and logos of
> the WMF may be licensed separately for use in advertising and sales
> promotion to any publishing effort using the FDL'ed material in ways
> mutually acceptable to the WMF and the publisher.   Any customer who
> purchased the content could in turn modify the content and the
> attributions appropriately and then republish without the use of the WMF
> trademarks or logos.

Bingo.

Clearly any licensing arrangement for the trademarks or logos should
> include a right to review and cancel the use of the trademarks and logos
> in inappropriate fashions.

It's not extortion of free content.  It's being smart about marketing and
endorsements.  Managing licenses implies quality control; that is not the
same thing as instituting a requirement for every single book composed of
WMF-project related content.

I wasn't around for Big Cats.  Going forward, I hope we can achieve clarity
with minimal transactional friction from the community and publishers.  We
aren't here to be obstructionist.

-- 
Brad Patrick
General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
bradp.wmf at gmail.com
727-231-0101