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

Wed Jan 19 23:55:02 UTC 2011

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Michael S. Hart <hart at pglaf.org> wrote:

> The question is still simple:
>
> "Why not include items with non-commercial permissions?"
>

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/Commons:Licensing/Justificationsexplains
precisely why. Excerpt:

The most basic goal of Wikimedia Commons is to serve as a practical
repository for media currently in use on Wikimedia websites like Wikipedia.
If this were its only goal, we would have no problems accepting media that
is only for use on Wikipedia, or media that is only for non-commercial use,
since the Wikimedia
Foundation<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation>is
a non-profit institution.
The additional restrictions imposed by our license policy are driven by our
ultimate goal, which is to *enable all Wikimedia site content— both media
and text — to be creatively reused in a variety of contexts, in any country,
without the imposition of cumbersome requirements or fees*. What do we mean
by creative reuse? Here are just a few examples of the types of reuse that
we want to encourage with Wikimedia site content:

[...]

A recurring theme in all these scenarios is commercial reuse and derivative
use. Without commercial use, professional artists, industrial research labs,
republishers, and small businesses are cut out of the loop. Without
derivative use, not only can new works of art not be created, but content
cannot be properly integrated with existing services, and research that
automatically manipulates, aggregates, or changes the presentation of
content cannot be done. In short, the purpose of free licenses at Wikimedia
Commons is not to *save* businesses and professionals the hassle of
producing content themselves, but to enable *new* applications that would
have previously been considered too expensive to justify.
Most commercial content can be used under the doctrine of fair
use<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/fair_use>(or fair
dealing <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/fair_dealing> in the
UK), but the terms of fair use are extremely limited and depend strongly on
context. A work that may be fair use in the context of a Wikipedia article
on our website may cease to be fair use in an article republished for
profit, or in a professional artwork that creatively incorporates the work,
or even in a work that abridges the content. Moreover, fair use limits the
quality and extent of such a work that can be used, which in turn limits its
potential value for reuse. These subtle limitations make the reuse,
commercial or otherwise, of any fair use content fraught with legal peril

Here, Wikimedia Foundation may be replaced 1:1 with OKFN. Logically that is
-- I speak for neither organization.

You have identified a *tradeoff* between collection inclusiveness and use
inclusiveness, either of which can be attenuated. The correct choice for any
project depends on that project's goals, which you can call circular if you
want. A project that doesn't care about use inclusiveness at all might
choose maximum collection inclusiveness, ie completely ignore copyright
status, in which case it will have to be a dark archive, darknet, constantly
fighting losing legal battles, or some combination thereof. A project might
reject collection inclusiveness altogether and only curate works it has been
able to obtain massive insurance policies against. Or somewhere between.

There is no agenda that you're not privy to. The agendas of people
advocating various tradeoffs in the spectrum implied above have been
publicly on display for decades now.

I would love to hear your critique of the tradeoff any particular project
has made.

I would also love to read more about Project Gutenberg's criteria for
including a work. I think it is not widely known that they are more subtle
than "public domain only" (I did not know before reading this thread), and
they deserve to be known an PG is an incredibly important and influential
project. Thank you for everything you and the PG community have achieved,
sincerely!

Mike
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