Maybe you’re right and in the future the plum of free content with be too sweet to pass up. But considering how easy it is to paraphrase and repackage content (whether from Wikipedia, Citizendium, or good old-fashioned print), and the need of media organizations to do so in order to accommodate their audiences, I doubt that the kind of commercial use you describe would be common. Yahoo! and Google, of course, might find new ways of using the content (beyond what they can do with fair use), and Chinese propagandists will probably use what they want no matter the license. But in most cases, a company has to add value to the product to outcompete the original, which is where copyleft and the balance between getting it for free and giving their own work away comes in.

Anyway, you’re ducking the question, Sage. The question is whether, given that those media companies were to make heavy use of CZ articles, you would be in favor of a noncommercial license, such as CC-by-sa or GFDL, or instead a noncommercial one, like CC-by-nc-sa? I’m not really interested in your opinion of the likelihood of this; I haven’t been impressed with your prognostication skills in the past.

One of the reasons for making Wikipedia free content without usage restrictions is so that distribution of the content can be encouraged. If answers.com make a bundle from it, that takes nothing away from me as a writer and encourages the spread of the content. The GFDL is a copyleft (share-alike) license, so they can’t take it and lock it away.

Erik Möller has noted the problems with NC licenses: “marking up regions of content as non-commercial and consistently following these boundaries is almost impossible in a collaborative environment.” Lawrence Lessig agrees he has a point there (though, of course, continues to support NC for appropriate uses himself).

Summary: take away commercial use and you’ve immediately taken Citizendium out of the free content sphere, and immediately of less interest.

“Worse still are the effects that -NC licenses can have on people in the developing world, where entrepreneurship represents an opportunity to overcome poverty and the digital divide. People with basic access to freely licensed materials can redistribute them at a small profit using more traditional means such as photocopying or CD burning. In the absence of large scale government programs to broaden Internet access or distribute free content, market forces can play a clearly beneficial role in spreading free knowledge and free culture. Given cultural, language and access barriers, the common argument of -NC proponents that permitting commercial use on request is sufficient to allow for desirable uses, is at odds with reality.”

i.e. don’t cut off your content’s access for people without large bureaucratic structures to hand to spite answers.com.

An argument on that point that would get my attention would be one that explained why, despite being available for widespread distribution and redevelopment, noncommercially licensed content should not be called “free.” In other words, what is it about “freedom” that absolutely requires that the term be applied only to content that can be used by for-profit companies without compensation? There isn’t any reason that I’ve ever come across; it’s just a matter of definition, or rather, of dogma.

Unlike Sage Ross above, I do think that a company like Google would be interested in your content. (Not now, but when CZ has matured a bit.) As an example of their use of Wikipedia data, see the Wikipedia layer in Google Earth. As wikipedia, I’m very excited about that reuse of our content; it’s exactly why I chose to contribute to a “free” project. I’m sure that Google would add a CZ layer to Google Earth as well, unless you make that impossible by using a non-commercial license.

You talk about “adequate compensation”; I don’t expect Google et.al. to see that as a realistic alternative. There is, after all, a free alternative. More importantly, unless CZ asks for additional rights from its contributors when they edit a page, the authors own their own contributions. So any commercial license would mean that all individual citizendians would have to be paid. That is easily done for the reuse of a single page, but not for your entire website, which is what a big company would be interested in. Perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps CZ does ask its authors for the rights to relicense the content. In which case, the money goes to CZ, and not to the contributors. That would probably make a few supporters of a NC license unhappy as well.

Quite apart from practicle problems of having content under two different licenses, I just cannot see a non-commercial license benefitting citizendium. Feel free to prove me wrong, though.

That’s not a reason, of course. It’s easy to construct a reductio against it, anyway; history is full of “entire communities” that use words in idiosyncratic and ultimately unjustifiable ways. I might cite examples from 20th century totalitarian regimes.

You say that you’d lose interest in the project. But I notice that you’re not a contributor; there are many Wikipedians who I’m very glad are sticking with Wikipedia. We will find our own contributors among people who appreciate a different sort of project. I don’t recall any actual contributor who said he would quit if we chose a noncommercial license.

We haven’t made a choice, and we certainly haven’t yet chosen a noncommercial license, by the way.

Still, what I find endlessly fascinating is that you can’t bring yourselves to say, “Yes. Even if CZ had become enormously valuable in the way described, I still wouldn’t mind if media giants made a huge amount of money through the use of the content. I wouldn’t mind if they never gave a single bit of that money to the project, either. It’s their right.”

If you are willing to say that–please do!

As to the rest, of course, you’ll get my full arguments, developed at ridiculous and boring length, soon enough.

The Citizendium Charter, and the constitutional republic it defines, would ensure that the foundation behaves fairly.

And you’re right, I’m not at the moment a contributor. That’s why I commented here, and not on the forum. But I am interested in CZ at the moment; I’m following the forums, and what happens on CZ. I’m just not convinced (yet?) that citizendium is “more worthy” of my attention than wikipedia, so I stay there. Partially because of inertia, partially because the projects are (currently) only one-way compatible. CZ can use WP content; WP cannot use CZ content.

As I’m not a CZ contributor, I couldn’t care less what media giants do with your content. But I can honestly say that I consider wikipedia to be enormously valuable, and that I wouldn’t mind if media giants made a huge amount of money through the use of their content. I wouldn’t mind if they never gave a single bit of that money to wikipedia, either. It’s their right.

Even more so if that media giant uses the data in an interesting, innovative way, such as the Google Earth wikipedia layer. It’s so cool!

I would prefer it to be free for all to use. I also would prefer a license without any letter standing for Gnu.

Phil Deets

the experience with GFDL on wikipedia is that it has so many additional conditions (in particular the requirement to bundle a full copy of the GFDL with the product and the requirement to list the contributing authors) that major media companies will simply not employ it. The NYT would need an extra page it it were to fullfill the GFDL. Insofar, GFDL will allow dedicated commercial re-users to make use of the content, as it happened with the German wikipedia with e.g. the wikipress books (they commercially flawed, but that’s another issue), but still major media companies would not use the content other than by violating the license (as it is now with wikipedia content). Which gives you, or actually your lawyers, all options you may want. However, it is also that “licence overhead” that makes GFDL awkward to use for anyone else, even if non-commercial.

The best way out of that dilemma seems to allow GFDL for commercial and CC-BY-SA-NC for non-commercial uses, as the “licence overhead” is significantly less for CC-type licences. It’s not gonna solve the chinese propaganda problem, though, as I assume politics qualifies as non-commercial.

“Here’s the question, then. If we use a license that permits commercial reuse–CC-by-sa or GFDL–then every major media company in the world could, and probably would, use CZ content. Do you favor a license that allows… all sorts of giant new media companies to come, to use our content? Without compensation?”

That’s telling a half-truth. Because the true meaning of licenses like CC-BY-SA is the following:

“Here’s the question, then. If we use a license that permits commercial reuse–CC-by-sa or GFDL–then every major media company in the world could, and probably would, use CZ content. Do you favor a license that allows… all sorts of giant new media companies to come, to use our content? Without compensation, but with the requirement to acknowledge our copyright, to link to us, and let others use that content freely just as they themselves have used it freely?”

That is a far more honest presentation of such a “very interesting question” than yours, Larry. Would you be willing to admit that you phrased your question in an extemely biased manner?

Thanks. I think it is odd that more people haven’t answered this question directly, and I think it is an important question to answer. In fact, if CZ does adopt a free license like GFDL or CC-BY-SA, it should be a requirement of those who get accounts to answer the question (*) in the affirmative.

(*) Only slightly modified. Your question is “Do you favor a license that allows CBS, Fox, the New York Times, English tabloids, Chinese propaganda sheets, Yahoo!, Google, and all sorts of giant new media companies to come, to use our content? Without compensation?” In order to sign up for CZ, applicants should answer “Do you agree to license your contributions under a license that allows CBS, Fox, the New York Times, English tabloids, Chinese propaganda sheets, Yahoo!, Google, and all sorts of giant new media companies to use your content? Without compensation?”

That is to say, a non-commercial license is intended as a restriction on the actions of the *commercial entities*, not upon *Citzendium* itself and that Citizendium is free to license its content to whatever commercial entities it chooses at whatever cost (or no cost) for however long it likes.

I am aware that I do not understand these licenses perhaps as well as I should so some enlightenment would be appreciated on this matter.

If the above be the case then it does appear to change some of the arguments in favour of a commercial license that state a commercial license should be chosen because commercial entities (like Google perhaps) may not be willing to pay for content, especially if it is available elsewhere for free.

a) Content that has been imported from WP is under GFDL and will ever be exclusievely, because any change of licence would require to contact _all_ contributing WP authors, not the foundation or whomever else.

b) Already now CZ, as many other sites btw., violates the GFDL when displaying WP content by _not_ giving credit to the original authors. Some CZ pages relink to WP (others don’t even do that, like “Astronomy”), but this is not enough. Authors must be listed together _locally_ with the content, or on a subpage of the content. Because of c), the CZ is quite safe at this point, but this may change.

c) The licence giver (i.e. copyright holder) is not WP or CZ, it is the author himself. Any re-licencing is in his sole hands. Therefore, CZ cannot re-licence the content to make money (or even for free) to anyone, _unless_ the copyright has been transferred in some way (e.g. non-exclusive).

d) Because of c) neither WP or CZ can do anything against re-users violating the licence, it is in the sole hands of the copyright holder, i.e. the author, to pursue his rights.

e) Transfer of copyright is a double sided blade: Together with the rights CZ acquires about the content, it assumes the responsability of a publisher, which WP avoids for good rason: If the risk of being publisher rather than space provider is not obvious to you, read e.g. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/21407 This lawsuit (as well as others I know of) would have got an entirely different flavour.

f) The images mentioned on the forum which would be usable to CZ only if CZ has non-profit licence (I actually agree to that argument, but think it has to be thought through more thoroughly) will in any case hardly have their copyright transferred to CZ, so no re-licencing of those to make money.