[Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol

Fri Aug 1 20:38:41 UTC 2008

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 12:04 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
>...
> Strong copyleft gives me the protection that full-scale financial
> exploitation with no return is unlikely.

This is drifting off topic, but...

This particular argument against the less restrictive -BY type
licenses for open content does not make sense in the real world of how
authors are compensated for work, when they work for compensation.

Those authors who have started actively freely releasing their older
works, or newer / upcoming works, have seen increases in sales for
those works.

Additionally, a number of authors have ancedotally indicated that they
both sold previously unsold work they published openly, and gotten
inquiries and new business for commissioned work out of having
publicized themselves in that manner.

The idea that "I have to license this to prevent (unnamed huge media
conglomerate) from making money off my Wikipedia article" is silly.
Someone trying to publish a print set of Wikipedia for normal print
rates would fail - it's free on the web.  Including an article or
parts of an article in a larger work of some sort wouldn't be the sort
of wholesale financial rip-off that many feel it is... a normal author
makes five to ten cents a word in advance (and often no more than the
advance) for most types of writing, to bound the problem.  A 500 word
WP article is therefor something that a publishing house would
compensate $25 - 50 to have an author write it from scratch.

I would rather forego $50 and get my name out there (free advertising
for my writing abilities!).

Professional writers either are falling into the "Don't redistribute
my stuff at all" camp (old writers, some new ones), and "Here, take
it, I own copyright but please give this to your friends" camp.  Also
somewhat distinguished by genre.

The "copyleft" -SA type licenses are not seemingly relevant to actual
compensation for writing.  If anything, they seem to by
counterproductive, by inhibiting the types of reuse which would be
likely to effectively publicize one as a good writer (denying you your
share of the free publicity associated with writing it in the first
place) without giving any significant chance of actually receiving
direct compensation of note for the writing itself.

I don't object to people holding that intellectual opinion.  But I
think that those who do are in fact shooting yourselves in the foot on
the practical "might make money off this" sense.  I think you've
trapped yourselves in a 1980s vintage philosophy that has failed on
actual application to the real world.  If you want to make money off
writing, any of your writing, you need to talk to and look at what
people who write for a living do with their intellectual property.  I
believe Cory Doctrow's viewpoint is far more relevant than Richard
Stallman's on this point.

This is completely unrelated to the "keeping it free and open"
justification for GFDL / -SA type licenses, of course.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com