[Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects

Wed Jan 3 16:18:53 UTC 2007

geni wrote:

>On 1/3/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>We have far less video, so we do see less video collaboration.. but we
>>do see video collaboration. Of course, if we prematurely shut of
>>collaboration by forcing video content to a non-collaborative medium
>>(which the internet archive is) we will of course never see the volume
>>and value of what we have missed.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>When it comes to videos the GFDL sucks worse than it does for images.
>
>
>  
>
How so?  I will admit that the GFDL is written primarily for textual 
manipulation and content, but that is about like saying the GPL is lousy 
for copyright purposes in a book.  Other than the "authorship" clauses 
being blurred so much for video that it is hard to determine exactly who 
participated with the development of the video (motion pictures can 
sometimes involve hundreds of people in the production of one "work"), 
I'm not exactly sure what the issue is here.

The general philosophy of the GPL and GFDL is that you are free to copy 
and redistribute the content, provided that you don't put any additional 
restrictions on the people that you give the content to.  And you must 
also give the ability to freely redistribute that same content to those 
who are recieving the stuff.  One other basic point is that you are also 
free to modify and change that content without fear of reprisal from the 
content originator.  Most of the rest of the GFDL and the GPL are fine 
details to make sure that these basic principles are defined in a strong 
legal manner.

While I may admit that a license like these may have to be written 
explicitly for video and music archives to achieve the same 
philosophical goals, I'm curious about what explicit issues you are 
worried about in the case of video and why it doesn't apply.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning