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

Tue Jan 18 08:25:54 UTC 2011

On 16.01.2011 18:20, Michael S. Hart wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Jan 2011, Mathias Schindler wrote:
>> On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Michael S. Hart <hart at pglaf.org> wrote:

Dear Mr. Hart,
excuse me for jumping into this discussion at this late point.

I am the public lead of Creative Commons Norway. And since I think
I've seen this  discussion before, I hope you will indulge me when
I try to provide some background.

> You are taking something very simple and trying to making it not so,
> which has been my point all along.
> 
> If you are running a non-profit operation, as it sounds this one is,
> and I asked back at the beginning of this, then there is no reason a
> vast number of "OK for general uses other than commercial" items are
> available for inclusion.

This may not be as simple as you think, because in what can loosely
be called the "free culture movement", terms such as "free" and
"open" are highly contested.

For instance, some people argue that the GFDL and the its brother,
the CC BY-SA, are inherently non-free because a *free* licence must
also guarantee anyone the freedom to *not* attribute, and to *not*
share derivatives.  I think these people would object to *any*
licensing scheme because licensing inherently rests on copyright,
which they want to abolish as a matter of principle.

Some are very sweet about this, like the "copyheart" people:

  http://copyheart.org/

And some are less sweet, as the anti-IP anarchist lobby:

 "Creative Commons is really an anti-commons that peddles a capitalist
  logic of privatization under a deliberately misleading name. Its
  purpose is to help the owners of intellectual property catch up
  with the fast pace of information exchange, not by freeing
  information, but by providing more sophisticated definitions for
  various shades of ownership and producer-control.
 "What began as a movement for the abolition of intellectual property
  has become a movement of customizing owners' licenses. Almost
  without notice, what was once a very threatening movement of
  radicals, hackers and pirates is now the domain of reformists,
  revisionists, and apologists for capitalism."
  Source: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Copyright-Copyleft-and-the.html

Other critics of Creative Commons have no problem with the concept of
licensing, or captitalism, but still think that it was a *really* bad
idea on the part of  Creative Commons to include the "non-commercial"
option in the suite of licensing terms.  For instance, the CBC
(Canadian Broadcasting  Corporation, a not-for-profit public service
broadcaster) recently prohibited the use of Creative Commons-licensed
music in any of its podcasts.  The cause, apparently, was that the
"non-commercial" clause proved unmanageable for CBC.  Chris Meadows
commented:

 "This ... highlights a major problem with the Creative Commons
  licensing scheme — it fails to take into account the increasing
  manner in which non-commercial and commercial uses intermingle,
  and how hard it is to tell one from the other. If a noncommercial
  podcast or blog enters into a redistribution agreement with a
  commercial entity, CC-licensed content that was formerly
  perfectly kosher for it to use suddenly and magically becomes
  verboten." (for full story, see
http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/cbc-decision-highlights-creative-commons-drawbacks/
)

My point my saying all this, I guess, is that when stuff it is not
completely free to use and share, things are *not* simple.

> If you don't include them, it's your own fault, not the fault of the
> people who create them and make them available to the general public
> and you should stand up and take complete responsibility for choices
> of this nature, without any pretense.
> 
> The Project Gutenberg collection is copied and reposted all the time
> all over the world, even though it contains copyrighted materials.
>
> The collection being considered here could be the same way.
> 
> SHOULD be the same way if you are trying to bring the most materials
> to the most people.
>
> Why rule out all of those works on which people claim copyright, and
> are also willing to have shared by billions of people worldwide on a
> non-commercial basis???
> 
> I can't think of a good reason.
>
> That's why I've been asking.
> 
> However, some seem to be adamant about keeping all of such materials
> out of the proposed distribution channels.
> 
> Why?

As a veteran of these debates, I have come to realize that people
simply disagree about these things.  There may be as many reasons
for this disagreement as there are people.

If we return to the issue at hand, i.e. the "Open Knowledge Foundation"
and their Public Domain Review ( publicdomainreview.okfn.org )
- whose question about the licensing terms of the Wellcome Trust
image collections sparked this thread - I can think of at least
several good  reasons for them to *not* feature works with
licenses that forbids commercial use.

To just give you one:  The site's name happens to be "Public Domain
Review". As a member of the public, what I expect to find when I
visit this site are reviews of works in the public domain.  I
would be very confused, and even wonder what charlatans were
running the site, if a site called "Public Domain Review" featured
reviews of works *not* in the public domain.

Copyright is complex, and most people, unfortunately, do not
understand it well.  I think the last thing the world needs
is someone compounding the general confusion surrounding
copyright by applying the legal term "public domain" to
something that isn't.

Btw: I would think wonderful it if someone created a website named
freefornoncommercialusereview.org, to provide a similar review service
for works that are free for non-commercial use.  But if the good
people of the "Open Knowledge Foundation" instead want to dedicate
their time and effort to promoting works that is in the public
domain, I think we should understand and respect their choice.
-- 
- gisle hannemyr [ gisle{at}hannemyr.no - http://folk.uio.no/gisle/ ]
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