Archive:Should we permit or disallow commercial use of CZ-originated articles?

Policy argument summary started March 23, 2007

The issue explained neutrally

At issue is the question whether entities may use (some of) our articles, under our standard license, for commercial purposes. There is no question that we do and will always permit noncommercial use of our content.

More particularly, should we use CC-by-nc-sa, on the one hand, or CC-by-sa or GFDL, on the other, for articles that are not required to be licensed otherwise? For those articles that began life on Wikipedia, we are required to use the GFDL. For articles that make no use of Wikipedia content, we need not use the GFDL.

Affirmative: Permit commercial use.

Argument: Commercial use is part of the definition of free/open content.

Just like a free software program must be available for commercial use, free content must be also. See also: http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC The point being that if the content of CZ is not free/open that users may not want to contribute to it.

Reply: So what?

This argument, even if correct--and it seems unconvincing simply because it involves the stipulation of terms of art--establishes absolutely nothing. Presumably, there is something good about being free/open content. The question is whether, by forbidding commercial use, we would not share in what makes free/open content a good thing. This argument does not even address the issue.

Reply to "so what"

"The question is whether, by forbidding commercial use, we would not share in what makes free/open content a good thing."

By going noncommercial, we will not be compatible with Wikipedia. This will cause major headaches will moving articles, merging articles, and adding wikipedia content to an article started under a different license.

Argument: "Noncommercial" is not well defined.

It's not clear what constitutes commercial use and what doesn't. This is a problem both for potential contributors and for potential users of the content. Potential contributors will have to worry about their works being exploited in ways they didn't intend, and will have to spend lots of money on legal help to enforce their rights; and potential users will have to worry about being sued for uses they believe are legitimate, and will have to spend lots of money on legal help to defend themselves against lawsuits.

If a noncommercial use license is chosen, it should be accompanied with a detailed explanation of our interpretation of what constitutes commercial use, and this should be considered incorporated into the license agreement to the extent possible. But it would be better to define what constitutes commercial use first, before it is decided what license to use, because the arguments for and against a noncommercial license rest upon what is and what isn't considered commercial use.

For example, is it commercial use for a university to sell copies of selected Citizendium articles to students? What if they roll the cost of the articles into the cost of tuition? Are nonprofit organizations categorically exempt from the provisions prohibiting commercial use? If a nonprofit distributes a CZ article attached to a request for donations, is this commercial use? What if a sponsorship statement is attached? What if an advertisement is attached?

Reply: Noncommercial is defined in the license.

"Noncommercial" is explained in Creative Commons site.

Pro Commercial, Pro GFDL only user's reply

Reply to "sell CZ articles to students": Students would also check the internet, where they can get articles for free. This is based to the university level reader and students at universities often utilize the internet instead of buying books.

Again, why would anyone buy something that is available for free online? You say, not everyone has the internet?, then what is the harm in providing people with printed information that they do not already have. Is that really an injustice? And once they learn they can go to the library to get the information, would they really buy it again?

We have advocacy groups on campus to keep stupid costs like that out of tuition costs and to keep our tuition as low as possible. The chance of someone adding a CZ cost into tuition is border-line absurd.

Reply

If you wish that Citizendium be free for students, there is no reason for allowing commercial use. If it allows commercial use, you will never be sure that it will always be free for people. Commercial interests will always be priority.

Reply

It will always be free online at www.citizendium.org, and by being compatible with wikipedia, the content will be better faster and will attract more users to help spread the knowledge to all.

Also, if you forbid commercial use, there will be no incentive of delivering information to areas that do not have internet access. Anyone with internet access will go to www.citizendium.org (especially students).

Argument: Commercial use facilitates competition.

In a perfect world the board of directors that ultimately runs Citizendium will always make all the right decisions. However, the reality of the situation is that this isn't necessarily going to always be the case. But if and when Citizendium does start making decisions which don't reflect the will of a significant portion of the community, a license which allows commercial use makes it easier for that group to compete.

The fact of the matter is that it costs money to compete with CZ. Exactly how to go about doing so without violating the license depends a lot on the details of what constitutes commercial use (see above), but whatever use isn't allowed is an option which is taken off the table. If the definition of commercial use is narrow, then competition is easy, but then the ability for large commercial interests with expensive lawyers to circumvent the license is great. If the license is tight, and the definition of commercial use is broad, then the ability of commercial interests to exploit loopholes is small, but rightful use and competition is also made difficult. In either case, to the extent the license is not well defined, it would pose a requirement that a competitor spend significant resources obtaining legal advice.

Reply: Commercial use isn't necessary for competition.

While allowing commercial use facilitates competition, it is not a necessary condition for competition. Citizendium is just the sort of competition to Wikipedia that the argument posits as a potential good down the road in case Citizendium starts making bad decisions - CZ was started because people felt that some aspects of Wikipedia were irreparable. While Wikipedia is GFDL-licensed, and thus commercial projects can, and do, make use of its content, Citizendium is non-commercial, thus proving that a non-commercial entity can overcome the financial barriers to entry. In fact, some financial and intellectual resources are available only to non-commercial entities, and Citizendium is making significant progress towards tapping those resources; if in the future Citizendium needs competition, competitors will have the example of Citizendium as a how-to guide for obtaining those resources for non-commercial competition.

Reply to both

Our real competition is Wikipedia. By going commercial, it will be our system against theirs and we all know wikipedia's system is flawed. Therefore, we will eventually win out. By having commercial license we can incorporate good wikipedia information in to our CZ started articles and then make it better -- this is competition. Without a commercial license we will be competiting on 2 different tracks instead of 2 different lanes in the same track (refers to running track race). Without a commercial license, we will not be able to easily use wikipedia information because of license conflicts. We will not be able to change licenses on an article once it is started under a different license.

Argument: Commercial use permits maximum distribution of content.

It is becoming increasingly clear that redistribution on others' websites is an exceptionally useful form of publicity for many different forms of media. Redistribution on commercial websites is particularly valuable because these sites often have a high user base and a reputation for quality. Wikipedia has notably benefited from its exposure on the NASDAQ-listed company Answers.com alongside material from many other reputable resources such as the Encyclopaedica Britannica, the American Heritage Dictionary, the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia and others. Citizendium should exploit the same opportunities and indeed failure to do so may cost it gravely if Wikipedia continues to be referenced and sourced by large well-known websites and Citizendium is not. A non-commercial license will likely dissuade large commercial websites from sourcing our material and cost us in terms of both publicity and endorsement of quality.

However, the major problems of noncommercial-only licensing are the hurdles it places in the path of hard copy distribution. Access to Citizendium as-is is conditional on having a computer and internet access — resources which not everyone enjoys. Distribution to offline users (the majority of the world's population) will involve making and transporting physical media, which costs money. The by-nc license does not grant the right to charge a fee even to recover costs, which not only restricts myriad entirely reasonable and desirable non-profit-making uses but means that offline users will have to rely on either charity or the direct intervention of Citizendium to receive its material (the latter may prove tricky for copyright and other reasons). While there are resources available for charitable distribution we should not force offline individuals to rely on this.

Nobody should have to rely on anyone's goodwill to get hold of our material. If it is simpler or quicker for someone to pay others to bring them the material than to go directly to the website and get it themselves, we should not prevent them — it should be their choice, not ours.

Reply: The Citizendium website is maximum distribution.

Citizendium intends to be the biggest and the most reliable encyclopedia. It is not necessary to allow others websites to redistribute its contents.

Reply: Non-commercial sites could offer similar features to commercial sites.

Citizendium may create a "new culture", a "noncommercial culture". Others organizations may adhere to this "new culture" and new non-profit sites may arise.

reply

profit sites do better than nonprofit sites on average (verify). We cannot rely on "may start a new culture" we must work with what we have. Anything we start that is new has to be in our total control. We cannot wait to see if things change later on things that are outside our control. Answers.com and others will continue to do well. They will not fail. We need to be commercial to get publicity on them.

Argument: Having incompatible licenses is a nuisance.

It will cause a lot of problems if some of our articles fall under the GFDL and some fall under a non-commercial license. We won't be able to move text from one article to the other if those articles have incompatible licenses. We won't be able to merge two articles with incompatible licenses into one, except by rewriting one of them from scratch. Any kind of reorganization which involves more than one article will require checking the licenses and thinking about copyright law. Incompatible licenses will require us to spend quite some time on making sure we obey the licenses which we (partially) chose ourselves, time which could be spent on writing and improving articles. Many potential authors will be discouraged by such legal hassles, or they'll neglect the legal requirements.

Reply: Then we should not use GFDL at all.

There is no need to move an article from the non-reliable Wikipedia, which is GFDL, to Citizendium. It is preferable to be compatible with high quality noncommercial contents. For instance, materials from the Australian and Canadian governments are "noncommercial" and it would be much easier to find noncommercial contents in universities and institutions than contents allowing commercial use. In the total sum of things, Wikipedia is a small and murky commercial pond in a clear ocean of non-commercial entities.

reply

if we do not use GFDL at all then

1. We will lose users
2. we will have to delete a ton of content
3. we will discourage wikipedians from joining

Argument: A noncommercial license hinders sharing with Wikipedia.

We are not in competition with WP, nor are we a branch of WP. What we are is a separate but similar project, with the same general goal of producing a free public encyclopedia by community writing and revision, but the specific goal of producing one with controlled expert review. There are good reasons to have both, and therefore they should both be done optimally after their different fashions. We want our project to be as good as possible, so we wish to use good attributed copyright-free material from other sources, subject to our editing and review. We also want to encourage their project to be as good as possible, and therefore want them to use whatever of our material may serve their good purposes, realizing that they will be subject to their processes of editing.

Reply: It's not just noncommercial licenses that are incompatible.

The CC-by-sa license is also incompatible with the GFDL used by Wikipedia. Future versions of these licenses may become compatible but at present they remain mutually exclusive.

Rebuttal: The GFDL and CC-by-sa are fundamentally compatible.

The GFDL and CC-by-sa provide for the same fundamental ends on all major points and so by no measure can be considered "mutually exclusive". The phrase is simple hyperbole and inaccurate. CC-by-sa images and GFDL text in Wikipedia are already commercially distributed "mutually alongside" one another. People are "banking" on the fact they will be found legally compatible in the future, enough to act as if the matter were foregone. It is much more rationale for Citizendium to assume the compatibility of the two licenses, not the inverse.

reply

overall, compatibility with wikipedia needed to be addressed on this wiki article since this article is getting more attention than the GFDL only article.

Reply: There are excellent reasons to disallow Wikipedia from using Citizendium original articles.

Citizendium is, in fact, in competition with Wikipedia. Failure to recognize this is failure to fully recognize and appreciate the nature and aims of the Citizendium project. It is also failure to recognize the great social good that can come from competition. Citizendium is much more than just a better working environment in which to create improved articles for re-importation into Wikipedia. Choosing a licensing option for Citizendium's original article's that is incompatible with Wikipedia's GFDL is crucially important if that competition is to have its rightful effect on both projects, and thereby improve the lives of millions of information consumers.

Having CC-by-nc avoids lopsidedness in favor of Wikipedia while ensuring a fair relation. For original Citizendium articles, we cannot use Wikipedia content, and in the same way they cannot use ours. Like with like. For Wikipedia-sourced articles we improve and approve, Wikipedia can take them back up from Citizendium. Again like with like.

The choice for a noncommercial license ensures that Citizendium's article creation system can retain its competitive advantage over Wikipedia's current one. The resulting competition is the best way to "encourage their [Wikipedia's] project to be as good as possible". Ensuring competition between Citizendium and Wikipedia through partially incompatible licensing stands to greatly improve life for millions of information consumers over the way things stand now.

Rebuttal: Article incompatibility is better achieved through stylistic means than the blunt instrument of a license.

Both Wikipedia and Citizendium cover many similar topics and therefore have an interest in being able to share the other's material. Creating incompatibility via licenses is a heavy-handed measure that will cause bad feeling and division in a community that needs nurturing in any form. Citizendium can better assert its individuality and uniqueness by adopting different editorial and stylistic conventions, that do not interfere with the encyclopaedic mission but which are distinct from those of Wikipedia. This does not prevent the beneficial copying back and forth of useful material but will stand in the way of large-scale duplication of articles.

Pro GFDL only "Reply to There are excellent reasons to disallow Wikipedia from using Citizendium original articles"

Do you want Users from Wikipedia to join us? No, seriously, do you? Users and edits are equal to money for a business. The more edits the better. Always, keep this in mind when determining policy. Think: Which license will get us the greatest number of users? the greatest number of readers?

Negative: Disallow commercial use.

We might as well resolve ourselves to be a feeder-wiki, leading to our demise

If Citizendium uses the GFDL, it will be trivial to synchronize content back and forth between it and Wikipedia. We cannot expect Wikipedia to be systematically biased against information gathered and vetted on Citizendium. Any noncontroversial areas in which the Citizendium excels will quite quickly result in Wikipedia taking up the articles and rapidly rising to the same level of excellence. We might as well resolve ourselves to be a feeder-wiki if we go GFDL.

Evidence of and Wikipedians who have made this argument

• Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees member Erik Möller

I think some of the articles in CZ have seen nice development, and I would love to take them back into Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Citizendium (unlike Wikipedia) is not currently free content.[1]

• Wikipedian David Cannon, a well-respected contributor:

A larger number of lurkers from Wikipedia will, however, peruse the newly created articles on Citizendium and scavenge them. Given the public profile of Wikipedia, readers are far more likely to find the articles on Wikipedia than where they are originally posted, and Citizendium editors will be left wondering what they are working for and why.[2]

Argument: Commercial use would permit people to profit on the backs of volunteers.

Corporations that have no participation in the project may make money whatever they can on back of volunteers. It is not fair that some people work for free while others profit from this.

Reply: We will get something in return if our work is used.

With an appropriate license choice, the community is paid back with similar access and rights to all extensions and derivatives of their work.

Reply: There is nothing wrong with commercial use.

Wikipedia has shown that volunteers do not mind commercial use of their work. On the contrary, some users may choose not to contribute to CZ if the freedom to make commercial use of their work is not granted.

Rebuttal: Many users may prefer noncommercial licenses.

Citizendium intends to be of high quality and be completely different of Wikipedia. The authors who prefers cc-by-nc-sa have the option to contribute in Citizendium. Besides, many contributors of Wikipedia have no knowledge about licenses, if they find out cc-by-nc-sa, they may prefer it.

Reply: People will always profit on the backs of volunteers.

Everyone who is paid by Citizendium will be profiting on the backs of volunteers anyway. Any lawyers hired by CZ, any webhosting providers they pay, the electric company that provides the energy to the servers, the sponsors who have their names mentioned, the computer companies that sell them the computers, etc. The only question is whether or not third parties who aren't paid directly by Citizendium can compete against those who are paid directly by Citizendium - something which will lower the amount of profit which is made off the backs of the volunteers.

Rebuttal: Fewer people will profit if a noncommercial license is used.

Far fewer people will profit from the volunteers of Citizendium if it is noncommercial. If Citizendium allows commercial use, many corporations will profit from it.

Argument: If contributors share copyright, the Citizendium Foundation could relicense articles commercially.

Elaborate the argument here.

Reply: Then the Citizendium Foundation, too, is profiting on the backs of volunteers.

Elaborate the reply here.

See also

• CZ:Should authors share copyright with the Citizendium Foundation?

Argument: A non-commercial license permits overall greater encyclopedia quality through freer use of allowable images.

Similar to the argument Commercial use would permit people to profit on the backs of volunteers, users may be disinclined to take pictures/images, append them on CZ articles, and have that picture/image profit others.

A non-commercial license ensures users' pictures/images are used to transmit information solely, rather than profiting others. Relevant images improve article quality; for example, a user may not know how an African Forest Elephant looks like. An image taken by a user at the Zoo and appended to the CZ article, would help an article illustrate the description of said elephant.

To sum up in an quote: A picture says a thousand words.

Reply: Images can have different rules.

Images are generally much less collaborative than the text of an article. Therefore, it is possible to allow image authors to choose from various different licenses for their images. This could also be done with the text, but the collaborative nature of the text would make it too difficult to either have all authors agree on a license or to track which parts of an article were under which licenses. With images, there is usually only one author, and rarely more than a few.

One might argue that incompatible licenses for images and text can't be combined. But there are two responses to this. First of all, most free licenses allow for combining independent works under different licenses. Secondly, and quite definitively, by uploading an image or contributing text to Citizendium you are explicitly allowing images and text under different licenses to be combined.

Rebuttal

Gratis permissions are not issued in materials available for commercial sale, even for education use. This is the standard in most permissions, for example Image_talk:Wessel_1954_fig1.png/Permission.