Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Reports/March-April Community Conversations Monthly Report

Questions about licenses

Hello, thank you for the report. Please allow me to quote a part from it and ask some some questions, just for me to better understand.

"The movement stakeholders should rethink its CC tenets and incorporate the use of No Derivative works (ND) and No commercial work (NC) licensing. However, there should be efficient checks and balances to ensure that materials in these categories can be proven as lost media. There should be caveats and clauses that will give communities that are historically prohibited from telling their stories a chance to be heard in commons."

I would like to know:

• What is the motive behind this wish, could you give examples why NC and ND is sometimes necessary?
• I am not sure what is meant by "lost media"?
• Is ND or NC necessary for "communities that are historically prohibited from telling their stories a chance to be heard in commons"?
• By the way, I just read about Licenses on Wikimedia Commons again. Indeed, ND and NC are ruled out. But maybe a different Wikimedia wiki (a new one?) could be the platform for ND or NC licensed files?

Personally, I am quite neutral on ND and NC. I do think that there are some good reasons for the prohibition, in the sence of a system of "giving and taking". So, I am interested to read more about your ideas. :-) Ziko (talk) 13:28, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

@Uzoma Ozurumba: I think this is a question to you. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 13:57, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Re:Questions about licenses

Hello Ziko, thank you for your questions and I apologize for responding late.

• "Lost media" are hard to find media with unknown copyright, they are also materials that once existed and are not accessible to the general public.

• About the motive behind incorporating the use of No Derivative works and an example, I would say that when a lost media is found and is no longer relevant to tell a story in its state, modifications of the media will be necessary for the content to be understood by the public. I think an example will be adding a subtitle to a video licensed under CC.

I know I have not answered all your questions, but I have attempted to answer some of them based on my understanding and limitations of our knowledge about CC. However, it will be a privilege to be enlightened by you since you are very knowledgable about CC and has years of experience working and volunteering in the movement.

Thank you.

--Uzoma 10:27, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Hello, thank you for your reaction. Well, I am not the one who has a general problem with NC or ND. So, if I am asked to rethink "CC tenets", I am curious about the problems other people might have with it and why they want me to rethink. Ziko (talk) 08:53, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

It looks like "lost media" is being used here to mean "orphan works" or "out of commerce works" or something similar. We have plenty of resources on the topic, see for instance https://www.communia-association.org/tag/orphan-works/ . It also helps to read some foundational materials on the reasons for free licenses, such as https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html . It's possible that, by taking for granted the reasons why this entire movement is built around copyleft, we often fail to explain this important topic frequently and clearly enough. If we can make a list of unclear points and doubts, maybe we can get a series of blog posts or something to make this essential information more accessible, so we can push the boundaries of our "understanding and limitations of our knowledge about CC". Nemo 20:05, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose non free licenses like NC and ND One of the 5 Pillars of Wikipedia is that content should be free. Creative Commons as an organization explicitly says that NC and ND licenses are non free. The license choice in Wikimedia projects is fundamental to the Wikimedia community. There is always room for conversation but it would take many complicated discourses to even consider this. A change to this policy seems like the kind of discussion which starts with recruiting 1000 people to comment, then takes several rounds over a 1-2 years where several thousand more people comment. It is challenging for me to imagine otherwise. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:11, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
• NC and ND licenses are a tool for authoritarian centralism and totally contrary to our mission. They almost never achieve what their users hope them to, see Free knowledge based on Creative Commons licenses, for which reason it has been often argued that they should be removed from the license suite. https://creativecommons.org/2012/12/17/next-steps-noncommercial-and-noderivatives-discussion/ . I would encourage the Igbo and Aragonese wikimedians, who apparently argued for unfree licenses, to clarify what use cases they had in mind. Nemo 19:28, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

I think that facilitating access to orphan works is a great idea. I think this has nothing to do with ND and NC licenses. If the work is orphan in the first place, how would you release it under such license? So it requires a different approach. Probably setting up an external repository of orphan works or working with external partners (Wikipedia Library would be very relevant here). There are a lot of online initiatives online that work on access to orphan works in different fields, for example the Marxists Internet Archive or the Filosofía en español project. However, legal status of these projects is probably quite tricky to deal with directly within Wikimedia. --MarioGom (talk) 11:14, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

See Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Working Groups/Diversity/Recommendations/9#Facilitating access to orphan works. --MarioGom (talk) 10:45, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

Product & Technology missing

It seems like the content Product & Technology got accidentally replaced with the one from Resource Allocation. --Tgr (talk) 18:58, 6 June 2019 (UTC)