A Wikipedia Controversy
by Dean Esmay
It started here and continued here and then here.
While I now view Wikipedia as the single most valuable information resource on the planet, I’m not sure where I stand on this controversy. I’ve got well over a thousand edits on the damned thing myself.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Subscribe to Dean's World by Email
7 comments
Molehill alert! How is this different from http://answers.com, an ad-supported site, copying Wikipedia freely as permitted in the license:
That last sentence does give some pause, but it seems pretty clear on commercial use of content. I’m sure there is a lawyer or two lurking around here to weigh in..
Inv A. DeSoda’s last blog post..The Assassination Smear 2
It seems legitimate to me, so long as the publisher is fully compliant with the GFDL. They make a profit by distributing the free content in a convenient form, but my ISP also makes a profit when I go online and read an article you’ve edited.
Seems like it would be hard to make MUCH of a profit. If there’s any market they will quickly be undercut by competitors selling exactly the same thing for less margin. It’s not much different from public domain literature.
I don’t particulalry like/understand intellectual property rights and don’t really understand why this is a controversy. How is this different from printing individual pages and putting thenm in a binder? Because someone is going to make money?
All the rules have been established and followed, someone is going to make money for the work.
At least one company has been publishing DOE and USN training manuals in paper & CD form for years, regardless of the fact that they are accessible for anyone who has web access.
It may be completely legal, but it will create some amount of restraint on some editors. I do some editing there, and it will have no effect on me. But I know that many of my fellow wiki-editors are from the "information wants to be free" crowd, who tend to be so anti-capitalist that I am sure that at least SOME of them will balk at adding to the profit of a multinational corporation.
Michael Gersh’s last blog post..Solution to Pricey Fuel? Burn the Food!
Now that I think of it, I recall reading not long ago that book prices are VERY firmly fixed in Germany, so that competition in book prices is basically nonexistent and, as is usually the case with price controls, the prices trend toward unnaturally high. It would not surprise me if the price of this book is fixed by the government and has nothing to do with the profit margin one way or the other.
It also strikes me that the Wikipedia Foundation is a non-profit that regularly needs to raise money to pay for the massive server clusters that house the project and the mammoth bandwidth entailed. So maybe this shouldn’t be a big deal? I’m still not sure.
The current license agreement seems fairly clear:
2. VERBATIM COPYING
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3. You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.
The goal of Wikipedia is to contribute to the spread of knowledge, right? I don’t see anything wrong with someone making money along the way.
bcostin’s last blog post..President Lincoln, call your office.
You must log in to post a comment.