[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Foundation's partnership with Kaltuna and loss of freedom

Sat Jan 19 01:06:22 UTC 2008

On 18/01/2008, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:

> We already delete a  massive number of fair use images daily simply being
> a screenshot of XYZ singer or ABC video game. Are we to think this won't
> happen with video? Are the administrators of the various projects ready to
> deal with such an increased number of copyrighted pages that will require
> deletion? The only way to ensure that this isn't a problem would to be to
> extend our fair use provisions in the various projects, allowing copyrighted
> media to be added more freely. We already see people taking the easy way
> out and uploading copyrighted images of famous people rather than attempting
> to acquire them freely.

It strikes me that this is a very fatalistic view.

One could easily have said that by providing an open public wiki and
asking people to fill it up with content we would be asking for a
massive amount of copyright violation; we could easily have said that
by allowing anyone to upload images we would be asking for a massive
amount of copyright violation; we could easily have said that by
allowing anyone to upload audio files we would be asking for a massive
amount of copyright violation.

Somehow, we managed them all, and we're doing generally pretty well at
beating back people's desire to add this stuff.

I really don't see that a video plugin would make this any worse.
Again, I don't see that it would *benefit* the encyclopedias much -
though Wikinews have been experimenting with video before, and
Wikibooks could probably make excellent use of it for tutorials, so it
has a definite niche - but assuming the rights issues and the software
legal issues can be resolved, then I don't see how having this
capacity in the MediaWiki toolbox will be the death-knell for all we
hold dear.

> However, such a change would cause the Foundation to basically abandon it's
> stated goal of providing /free/ content. If that's the case, they need
> to abandon
> their 501(c)3 status and start sending the money back. Personally, I don't want
> to see Wikipedia become a YouTube clone.

There is no intention for Wikipedia to become a YouTube clone. To
return to the earlier analogy - when we opened Commons, couldn't we
have worried with equal likelihood that it might become "a flickr
clone"?

----

Moving briefly back to the original email, I got an email from the
chap in question, who confirms my assumption was right; he saw it
misreported, missing out certain details, and reacted accordingly.

>> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/kaltura-partners-to-add-crowdsourced-video-to-wikipedia/
>> which explicitly says
>>
>> "Crowdsourcing video startup Kaltura is partnering with the
>> Wikimedia Foundation to put its video-mashup technology on
>> Wikipedia." - don't you think that's a bit misleading considering
>> that's not what is actually happening, hence my reaction?

Note the link omits that a) the beta isn't on Wikipedia; and b) there
isn't any plan to put it up as it currently stands.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to write quick
simple blog posts...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk