[pd-discuss] Contact between Wikimedia Foundation and Wellcome Trust regarding image collections?

Mon Jan 17 19:08:24 UTC 2011

I still have not seen the REASON for only doing public domain
and refusing to do non-commercial copyright.

As per the reasoning given below, it all seems to be circular
in terms of each of the arguments given all along and today--

We are what we are because we are what we are.

I was not the person who brought up the question of why not a
greater collection by including non-commercial copyright, but
I did understand the question had relevance, and so I emailed
a response, which generated the circular arguments that ended
up with us being at the present point, which sounds like:

We are doing what we are doing because we said so and there's
no way any suggestions for doing anything else, that might be
just as beneficial, just as legal, just as powerful, in fact,
just the same, other than for this one technicality.

I still have not seen the REASON for only doing public domain
and refusing to do non-commercial copyright.

I hope there IS no such reason and that this little bump will
soon be something in the past to laugh about rather than some
illogical limit placed on an operation that could be the more

INCLUSIVE

than

EXCLUSIVE

Why do you want to exclude the non-commercial copyrights???

I hope you won't think ill of me for making this suggestion,
as I really think you can do so much more simply by relaxing
the rule against using items that allow such "non-commercial
usage" as part of their copyright statement.

I should add that we have had many similar arguments about a
similar set of situations at Project Gutenberg, etc., and it
is basically a question of exclusion versus inclusion. . .as
per whether we define ourselves as "public domain" or not.

However, when the dust had settled, the world never viewed a
project such as Project Gutenberg as any different because a
portion of our collection was copyrighted.

It's not that kind of thing.

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg,
Inventor of eBooks

On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Jonathan Gray wrote:

> Michael: the main reason for restricting ourselves to material that is
> 'open' (in the sense articulated on opendefinition.org) is that this
> is the main purpose of the Open Knowledge Foundation, as written into
> our articles of association. Legally, as an organisation, we are
> obliged to have a focus on material that is open in this narrower
> sense. We are not called the 'Freely Available Online Foundation'.
> This doesn't mean that we don't (e.g. personally) think that its great
> to see more non-open but freely available material on the internet for
> all to access, but this is not our focus. I think its amazing that
> e.g. Project Gutenberg includes material that has been donated by
> authors, and great that James Boyle puts his books online (under a
> non-commercial license).
>
> An analogy: imagine we are called the 'Open Source Software
> Foundation' and we have a repository of open source software which
> others can freely use and reuse. Should we include freeware, shareware
> and other non-open software in the repository? Perhaps we should have
> something like Ubuntu's 'universe' or 'multiverse' repositories, which
> includes software which is not open source (which indeed we do: if you
> search for 'public domain' on CKAN, you can see that we include plenty
> of - unfortunately - non-open collections of public domain material,
> i.e. material in which organisations have asserted full rights in
> their digital copies [1]). Nevertheless we should still retain a focus
> on material that is fully open source, as that is the raison d'etre of
> our organisation.
>
> Also the OKF is keen to promote policies, practices and legal
> mechanisms (such as CC0, and the Creative Commons Public Domain mark)
> which enable everyone to use digital copies of public domain works
> without restriction. To 'keep the public domain in the public domain',
> rather than limiting how it can be used. E.g. so that one could take a
> plain text file of a novel that is in the public domain hosted by a
> library or an academic department and add it to Project Gutenberg or
> Wikimedia Commons. As I mentioned in a previous message, The Public
> Domain Manifesto and the Public Domain Charter both articulate this
> quite clearly [2].
>
> Does this make sense? If this thread boils down to 'should the Open
> Knowledge Foundation extend its focus to start to *promote* non-open,
> publicly available material?' then I'm not sure how far we'll get.
>
> As a compromise, with respect to PublicDomainWorks.net, I suggest that
> if and when we start to include links to 'resources' related to a
> given work (e.g. a plain text file on Gutenberg, a scan of a
> manuscript or an edition, an audio file, etc.) we include information
> about the openness of each resource, much like we already do on CKAN.
> Hence a work page would include the following rights related
> information (note: this would not be the full record, only the
> rights/reuse related stuff and enough other information for it to make
> sense):
>
>   1) Name of work (e.g. 'Hamlet')
>     a) Is the underlying work in the public domain in country X? (e.g.
> 'yes' in the UK)
>     b) Where can I find digital copies of this work?
>       i) Name/origin of resource (e.g. 'The Shakespeare Quartos Archive')
>       ii) URL (e.g.
> 'http://www.quartos.org/lib/XMLDoc/viewXML.php?path=ham-1603-22275x-hun-c01.xml')
>       iii) Is this resource open? (e.g. Not open, under Creative
> Commons Attribution Noncommerical license)
>
> This would mean that we acknowledge non-open material for others to
> use, but explicitly flagged it up as not fully open. We could even use
> this in conjunction with something like our 'Is It Open Data?' service
> [3] for scientists and others, to start to systematically contact
> organisations to clarify the legal status of digitised material, where
> there is no explicit statement on this.
>
> All the best,
>
> Jonathan
>
> [1] http://ckan.net/package?q=%22public+domain%22
> [2] cf. http://publicdomainmanifesto.org/ and
> http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/publications
> [3] http://www.isitopendata.org/
>
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Michael S. Hart <hart at pglaf.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Sun, 16 Jan 2011, Rob Myers wrote:
> >
> >> On 01/15/2011 10:27 PM, Michael S. Hart wrote:
> >> >
> >> > I just think that materials released for "all but commercial
> >> > applications" should be included in any public domain online
> >> > site. . .with the appropriate identification as such. . . .
> >> >
> >> > No reason to leave them out.
> >>
> >> Other than that they are not public domain.
> >>
> >> > I should add that thousands of Project Gutenberg files would
> >> > have to be eliminated under such a policy as I thought was a
> >> > suggestion earlier. . .as they are copyrighted.
> >>
> >> If they are copyrighted they are not in the public domain and it would be
> >> misleading to claim that they are.
> >>
> >> Project Gutenberg makes no such claim so I don't understand what the
> >> problem might be.
> >>
> >> - Rob.
> >
> >
> > Please see my other reply just given.
> >
> > It covers similar questions.
> >
> >
> > But I still don't understand why you, Rob, want to limit collections.
> >
> >
> > Please let us know.
> >
> >
> >
> > Thank you,
> >
> >
> > Michael
> >
> >
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/pd-discuss
> >>
> >
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