Anthony wrote: > In 1.0 and 2.0 I assume the appropriate section is 4(d). The > change from 1.0 to 2.0 adds a requirement to specify a URL.
Copyright (and also the European author's rights / Urheberrecht) used to be all about making copies, presumably physical copies. In trials such as the one against The Pirate Bay, an essential question is: who made the copies? Was it the uploader, the Internet provider, the link index, or the downloader? The four persons stand accused of assisting in the non-authorized creation of copies (medhjälp till exemplarframställning). This question is completely irrelevant to computer science, because bits are copied all the time, from one transistor to the next. But it is relevant to copyright law, because it is full of references to copy-making. Record stores and a libraries are collections of copies. The copies are the substance, and the space between the copies (sleeves, shelves, brick walls) is just an empty shell. (There are exceptions: The Library of Congress would probably not be quite the same if it moved to some other building.) The Internet, on the other hand, consists entirely of the space between the copies: servers, storage systems, connections, routers, networks, HTML markup, links, domain names, websites, search engines, page ranks, browsers, user communities, brand recognition, foundations, companies. There's so much jar and so little jam, that we have given this a special name: content. When I started a Gopher server in 1992 it was a fun technical experiment, but I needed content and had none. I started to write my own texts, but didn't get far. So I started to scan out-of-copyright Scandinavian books. I looked at Project Gutenberg and called my offspring Project Runeberg. But I was surprised that they only cared for the books, the e-texts, and didn't seem to care for the space between the copies. Theirs was just a pile of e-texts, which could be copied around at will, residing on some random FTP server that could change at any time. My first wish had been to build the server, the structure around the e-texts. They thought a mirror server was a great help in spreading e-texts. I though a mirror server was a sign of my failure to build the one-stop-shop. Since the e-texts are out of copyright, I couldn't stop people from mirroring them, but I could build a server that was good enough and pretty enough that there was no immediate need for mirrors. When Wikipedia started in 2001, I was fascinated by the concept, but surprised that again the same old "content only" attitude was there. Mirrors were allowed and encouraged. Is this really the way? So many details in technology and project guidelines could be questioned, that I started my own wiki in Swedish (susning.nu) that made a few things different. Among them, I didn't require GFDL licensing from my users, so the content was not "free" and could not be mirrored. This is not because I'm an evil person, but because I didn't see why that content needed to be free and mirrored if I provided a server good enough. Skipping the free licensing created a lock-in, which is something that most businesses would envy. Again, susning.nu was primarily a really fun technical experiment. It took until December 2003 before the German Wikipedia caught up at 50,000 articles. Soon after that, vandalism got out of hand, and I closed susning.nu in April 2004. The user community moved over to the Swedish Wikipedia, which has been quite successful. That was 2001-2004. After I closed susning.nu, I have tried to help Wikipedia. I now have a better understanding of why free licensing is useful. What I don't fully understand is if we're really trying to fulfill the mission (Imagine a world...), why are we spending so much effort (fundraising, staffing, operations) to operate the world's 7th most visited webserver? Is that necessary or just a burden? If free content is our focus, why spend so much on the space between the copies? The 7th most visited website is a Manhattan bank with marble-clad walls. Do we need that? If the content is free, people don't need to drink from our watertap. It's the water that's important, not the tap. We could have a minimal webserver to receive new edits. Serving replication feeds to a handful of media corporations (who might pay for it!) should be far cheaper than to receive all this web traffic. Some universities might serve up ad-free mirrors. We could be the Associated Press instead of the New York Times, the producer instead of the retailer. Or is the fact that we spend so much to maintain the 7th most visited website an admission to the fact that the space between the copies actually has a great value to us? A value that will be strengthened by cementing its URL and/or the name Wikipedia (attributing the project) into the new license? I'm not against that. I will go with whatever. I'm very flexible and I still think this is a very fun technical experiment. But I think the change is worth some consideration. -- Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se Wikimedia Sverige - stöd fri kunskap - http://wikimedia.se/ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
