Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Mike Godwin]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:06 PM, George Herbert
 wrote:

> Any policy - or policy change - we can think of will have unforseen
> consequences.

I agree with you. But we can't let this paralyze us in responding to a
problem that is no longer "unforeseen," but that in fact has occurred.
At minimum, the Haymarket article ought to edited to accommodate a
well-documented minority scholarly analysis -- surely we agree about
that.

> Is it possible that you being Mike Godwin is leading to a selection
> bias, where a large fraction of the actual experts with actual
> problems with process who did anything about it came to or through you
> on their way to solving or reporting the problem?

It's entirely possible. But it happens with enough frequency for me to
be able to articulate a credible hypothesis that this is happening too
often. Certainly there's no "selection bias" problem associated with
the sheer fact of the Chronicle of Higher Education article itself --
its existence is something that nobody here disputes, regardless of
how we interpret it. And I think there is a second hypothesis that is
also credible, which is that the Chronicle article very likely hurts
Wikipedia reputationally.

> It seems that there are a large surplus of the latter, and only a few
> of the former, statistically.  Assuming that's accurate, that should
> inform the policy discussion.

Certainly.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Mike Godwin]

I should add a response on this point:

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 6:35 PM, George Herbert
 wrote:

> The post-facto probability of 1.0 that the researcher was in fact
> professional, credible, and by all accounts right does not mean that a
> priori he should automatically have been treated that way before the
> situation was clarified.

Should we declare that "Assume Good Faith" is now a dead letter?

> By far the majority of people who come up and "buck the system" or
> challenge established knowledge in this manner are, in fact, kooks or
> people with an agenda.

To me the interesting thing is that this author did not "buck the
system." It seems clear he attempted to learn the system and abide by
the system's rules. If someone goes to the trouble he went to, getting
an article published in a peer-reviewed journal, then citing it in his
editing of the Wikipedia article, what else could he have done,
precisely?

If we pass over this and classify it as an anomaly, then I think the
very best thing that can be said is that this is a missed opportunity
to review UNDUE specifically, and, more generally, the problem of
policy ambiguity and complexity as a barrier to entry for new,
knowledgeable, good-faith editors.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Mike Godwin]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 6:35 PM, George Herbert
 wrote:

> If the answer to one is "yes", then "These things happen" is an
> explanation but not an excuse, and should be a prompt to help us all
> get better at detecting that.  These things do happen, but should not.
>  These things do happen, but we should expect better on the average.

Apart from the question of whether this particular article -- on the
Haymarket bombing -- has been hurt by editors' ill-considered
application of UNDUE, there's the larger question of what it means for
our credibility when a very respected journal, The Chronicle of Higher
Education, features an op-ed that outlines, in very convincing detail,
what happens when a subject-matter expert attempts to play the rules
and is still slapped down. If I thought this author's experience is
rare, I wouldn't be troubled by it. But as someone who frequently
fielded complaints from folks who were not tendentious kooks, my
impression is that it is not rare, and that the language of UNDUE --
as it exists today -- ends up being leveraged in a way that hurts
Wikipedia both informationally and reputationally.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 95, Issue 73

[Mike Godwin]

Fred Bauder writes:

> We're talking past one another. It is obvious to me that the author of
> the Chronicle article should have been able to add his research without
> difficulty, at least after it was published.

You're right, Fred. We actually were talking past each other, and
primary blame for that belongs to me: I read your posting standing
alone without fully grasping the context. My apologies for my
misreading it, Fred.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Mike Godwin]

Fred Bauder writes:

> I think it probably seems to climate change deniers that excluding
> political opinions from science-based articles on global warming is a
> violation of neutral point of view, and of basic fairness. That is just
> one example, but there are other similar situations.

This analogy is breathtakingly unpersuasive. Apart from the fact that
consensus about scientific theory is not analogous to consensus about
the historical records of particular events, climate-change-denial
theory is actually discussed quite thoroughly on Wikipedia. Plus, the
author of the op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education doesn't seem
at all like climate-change deniers.

If there is something specific you want to suggest about the author --
that he's agenda-driven, that his work is unreliable, or that the
journal in which he published the article is not a reliable source --
then I think equity requires that you declare why you doubt or dismiss
his article.

I read the article in the Chronicle pretty carefully. The author's
experience struck me as an example of a pattern that may account for
the flattening of the growth curve in new editors as well as for some
other phenomena. As you may rememember, Andrew Lih conducted a
presentation on "the policy thicket" at Wikimania almost five years
ago. The wielding of policy by long-term editors, plus the rewriting
of the policy so that it is used to undercut NPOV rather than preserve
it, strikes me as worth talking about. Dismissing it out of hand, or
analogizing it to climate-change denial, undercuts my trust in the
Wikipedian process rather than reinforces it.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Mike Godwin]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:57 AM, Mike Christie  wrote:

> Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad
> editing rather than to encourage good editing.  I don't think that can be
> changed.  It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement
> that was called for with the Haymarket article.

If policies don't encourage good judgment, or discourage bad judgment,
then what are policies for?

It seems worth discussing whether it would be good to revise the
existing policy to restore its original (presumed) functionality.

More generally, I've believed for a long time that WP policies have
been increased, modified, and subverted in ways that both create a
higher barrier to entry for new editors and that discourage both new
editors and existing ones.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Mike Godwin]

Jussi-ville writes:

>> The policy, misused in the course of POV struggle, is a way of excluding
>> information with interferes with presentation of a desired point of view.
>
> I think you are being way too generous. ... Let me repeat in more concise 
> form.
> The policy was written to enable serious work on hard topics, it as it
> stands, hinders work, making it hard to edit simple facts.

I think the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a
must-read. Here you have a researcher who actually took pains to learn
what the rules to editing Wikipedia are (including No Original
Research), and who, instead of trying to end-run WP:NOR, waited years
until the article was actually published before trying to modify the
Haymarket article. To me, this is a particularly fascinating case
because the author's article, unlike the great majority of sources for
Wikipedia articles, was peer-reviewed -- this means it underwent
academic scrutiny that the newspapers, magazines, and other popular
sources we rely on never undergo.

I think the problem really is grounded in the UNDUE WEIGHT policy
itself, as written, and not in mere misuse of the policy.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] My public aplogies to Jan-Bart (was Movement roles letter, Feb 2012)

[Mike Godwin]

JADP, but there's no keyboard-related reason for people to misspell my
last name as "Goodwin," which is something I've encountered my whole
life. My view is that it's normally best to tolerate the misspelling,
unless there's some particular reason I want to ensure that my surname
is spelled correctly. As someone who frequently must type in French,
German, or Spanish, I wish it were a little easier to get access to
accents and umlauts than it is on most keyboards I have to use, but I
also think there are bigger issues to worry about, most of the time.
The anglophone convention of typing, e.g., "Kurt Goedel" instead of
"Kurt Gödel", is common enough that English-language versions of
search engines will normally produce results for Gödel if you type in
"Goedel."

The general rule of etiquette is, I think, simply to try to get
spelling (and pronunciation, and other things) right, and to ask the
person in question if you're unsure.

For example, although I don't believe I ever addressed Jan-Bart as
"Jan", I do know that I was uncertain early on whether there is a
hyphen in "Jan-Bart" (obviously, I figured out the answer to that
question).


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] "We are the media, and so are you" Jimmy Wales and Kat Walsh OpEd in Washington Post

[Mike Godwin]

Thomas Morton writes:

> Politics is a game, a game that politicians are bred to play. I know this
> because, having spent several years helping fight stupid law making, I've
> seen all the tricks. And, boy, have we been played.

Dude, what am I? Chopped liver? I spent a huge part of my professional
life as a Washington. What's more, I actually know Cary Sherman of
RIAA. As in, I know him personally. We would recognize each other on
the street. My headline should be obvious -- I don't think we we were
played. Being effective in public-policy discussions is a learnable
skill, it turns out. You learned it. Perhaps you will allow for the
possibility I learned it too.

Of course the media companies are spinning this. The spin that Google
really is evil after all was an obvious if unimaginative choice.

But rather than declare this to be Amateur Hour (r), can't you allow
for the possibility that mass action got something right? Politicians
didn't think internet mass action mattered. Now they think it does,
and not just for fundraising or MoveOn or Tea Party campaigns.
Copyright and technology policy in Washington has been deeply screwed
up for some time. One path to fixing it it may be fine-tuning a phrase
or excising it from a bad law. On the other hand, there was this guy
named Martin Luther King who did not rule out mass action -- drew
inspiration from, amazingly enough, a lawyer from India. Who know that
lawyers could change public policy in a fundamental way, without
playing an inside game? The "inside" is as much literal as figurative
-- I'm talking about the Beltway, of course.)

Right now, best guess among policy experts is that SOPA and PIPA are
dead for the rest of the (political) year. That is not nothing. That
is something. And while preaching about the importance of Beltway
politics is almost always helpful, one occasionally comes across some
piece of writing that that has a foot in both worlds. I assume you
didn't enjoy the analysis written by this guy --
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/02/07/guest-blogger-sunlight-got-it-wrong/
-- but he actually seems to make  in that very piece.  the point you
believe is so revelatory and breathtakingly iconoclastic. Maybe you
would find the piece interesting if you gave it another read.


--Mike Godwin

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Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

Cyrano writes:

> Mike, I don't know how's the political landscape is in the USA, but you
> would say that there is few significative corruption and collusion?

No, I wouldn't say that. Whenever you have enough human beings
assembled to create a political environment, you create the potential
for corruption and collusion, and no nation, including the USA, is
immune from that. But you also create the potential for idealism,
principled activism, collective progressive action, humanitarianism,
and the growth and sharing of knowledge. And it was the better side of
human nature that we witnessed among our colleagues and allies in
working against these bad legal proposals.

To be effective politically you have to have a deep understanding of
the political environment you're working in. That's why the Foundation
drew upon knowledgeable people for advice as we all went forward in
expressing our concerns about SOPA and PIPA. In no instance has the
Foundation indulged in or supported anything that counts as corruption
or collusion. I think the Wikimedia Movement should be proud that the
Foundation has lived up to the Movement's highest ideals. The efforts
these last weeks have been both admirably transparrent and admirably
effective, and I think we all learned a lot from them.


-Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 7:45 PM, Theo10011  wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Mike Godwin  wrote:
>>
>>
>> Why do you imagine money spent is the measure of influence? The
>> pro-SOPA forces outspent the tech industry three-to-one and still
>> lost.
>
>
> Citation needed.

Here's a place to start:
<http://www.americablog.com/2012/01/story-behind-sopapipa-is-campaign-money.html>

But my favorite source for "citation needed" taggers is this:
<http://lmgtfy.com>

>> Plus, If money is the measure of effectiveness, what does this say
>> about Encyclopedia Britannica versus Wikipedia?
>
>
> We have more.

And who am I to take issue with such an indisputable, uncontroversial statement?


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Theo10011  wrote:

> This is an area I have no expertise in. My nascent understanding of the
> legal implication of those legislations aside, I, like others usually defer
> to more respected opinions. The Citizens United ruling for example has been
> criticized by President Barak Obama

I don't believe I suggested that Citizens United hasn't been
criticized by knowledgeable people. (I'm a critic too.) President
Obama, as a former constitutional law professor, for example, has
surely read both Bellotti and Citizens United.  What I said,
specifically, was that when I read popular discussions of Citizens
United online, more often than not I'm reading commentary from someone
who hasn't read the cases.

> You can read more about them in the rather large section on the criticism
> section of the ruling page.
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission#Criticisms)
>

My habit is to read the decision directly rather than read the
Wikipedia entry. No reflection on Wikipedia, of course -- it's just
that as a practicing attorney I am professionally driven to consult
primary sources.

> Well, that was my point, according to recent rulings, money is speech and
> corporations are people, albeit according to a naive but widely help
> understanding of it, one that is shared by several prominent professors at
> law.

My own habit is to read the cases directly, since I often must discuss
them with fellow lawyers who have also read the cases.

> We are Media too, Mike.

Just so. And it's something I never forget. All media must be received
skeptically.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Theo10011  wrote:

> Direct lobbying is relatively new compared to the older forms of government
> and legislative influence. Strictly from a global south perspective, a
> similar form of unregulated advocacy and influence that I saw practiced here
> was called something else...bribery.

I know you know this, but for those who don't, lobbying in the USA is
highly regulated. Bribery in the USA is a felony.

> In US politics, general lobbying in addition to rulings like the Citizens
> united, put large corporation in a powerful position to buy voices in
> Washington. If it is indeed going to be about getting voices heard *only*
> through lobbyists, I think the publishers can scream the loudest.

Where did that "*only*" come from? I hope not from anything I've written.

As for the Citizens United case, well, it's one of those cases that's
widely talked about but rarely read. The real core case on campaign
finance is the one I name below, now more than 30 years old.  It is a
complicated case dealing with the intersection of corporate regulation
and constitutionally protected political speech, and one could teach a
whole course about it, just to prepare someone to read Citizens
United.  Here's the enwiki link:
.

Almost invariably, when I hear people talk about Citizens United in
informal discussions, I'm hearing people who haven't invested the time
it takes to understand why these issues are entangled. And of course I
can't invest the time to give you a semester's worth of coursework
either. But one shorthand way to look at this is, do we want to say
that corporations don't have freedom of expression or the right to
engage in political speech? Because if we flatly decide that, what
happens to The New York Times Company (a for-profit corporation)?
Should the Times be barred from political speech? Or the American
Civil Liberties Union? (See
.)
My point here is to underscore that public discussions of Citizens
United and other cases rarely, in my experience, rise above
sloganeering. The problems involved in corporations' legal status are
subtle and complicated ones, not reducible to tweets and chants. I
support reform of corporate influence in politics, but not at the
price of making it impossible for an incorporated NGO to speak for
individuals who otherwise might remain unheard.

> That was partly based on my reading of the en.wp article on lobbying
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying), when you have a minute, do re-write
> the sections of the article where it is wrong.

I hope I may be forgiven that this particular task can't be at the top
of my to-do list just now. But I invite others to contribute to that
article. As is usually the case, a Wikipedia article is a fine place
to start research, but not itself an authority, as I think we all
agree.

> My
> question was who usually spends more? non-profits who run a free
> encyclopedia or giant publishers whose daily revenues are directly affected
> by these decisions?

Why do you imagine money spent is the measure of influence? The
pro-SOPA forces outspent the tech industry three-to-one and still
lost.

Plus, If money is the measure of effectiveness, what does this say
about Encyclopedia Britannica versus Wikipedia?

> Actually politico didn't publicize the engagement exclusively, the link kim
> provided, mentions it as one brief story in a list of 10 others, stating,
> "The foundation has snagged Dow Lohnes Government Strategies, according to a
> newly filed lobbying disclosure, to focus on “legislation related to online
> intellectual property infringement, including H.R. 3261, S. 968 and S.
> 2029.” Those bill numbers coincide with SOPA, PIPA and the OPEN Act." Along
> with the foundation did not return to comment to MT before press time.

Note the words "newly filed lobbying disclosure." So much for our big
secretive lobbyist arrangement!

> There are still a lot of powerful institutions and organizations, who get
> their message through, and make measurable impact without moving a single
> lobbyist. This is the first time we are engaging one, so just curious about
> what impact it has on perception of others.

I expect the impressions are more positive among those who are more
knowledgeable about political processes in the United States. As for
whether WMF should have engaged someone in DC to advise in this
context, I don't have an atom's worth of doubt that this was the
correct and appropriate strategy to keep Wikipedia and other Wikimedia
projects alive and vital in the face of ill-considered American
legislation.

> It's about ROI and impact of money invested. We have the biggest and direct
> way to get measurable impact on these issues, Wikipedia and the projects,
> with 400 million people watching. The blackout proved that, incurring little
> or no actua

Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

Theo10011  writes:

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Theo10011  wrote:

> Am I wrong to assume, that lobbying involves approaching a registered,
> professional consulting/lobbying firm in Washington who in turn, refer the
> client to politicians and then facilitate meetings and discussions in
> private, client are expected to pay expenses and other fees incurred in the
> process, usually a pretty hefty sum.

Yes, you're wrong.

> Are those discussions and arrangements
> made in private, facilitated by lobbying firms, what is needed to get our
> voice heard?

No. It can be helpful to have an experienced Washington
government-relations specialist to facilitate meetings, and to advise
you on how to be effective, but the word "private" is inappropriate
here. (The very fact that Politico was able to publicize WMF's
engagement with such a specialist ought to be an indicator of this --
in the USA, especially for the last 40 years, there have been vastly
increased requirements for public reporting and accountability, both
for nonprofits and for traditional corporate lobbyists.) When I
represented the Center for Democracy and Technology or Public
Knowledge at the FCC or on Capitol Hill, for example, the first thing
I had to do when getting back from a meeting was write up a report of
whom I met and what was discussed. The reports became part of the
public record, and part of these nonprofits' public disclosures as
well.

> You mentioned the protest, and how proud you were to have been associated
> with it, so were most of us. That was the right thing to do - open, direct
> and public. All of which this doesn't seem to be.

You'd be wrong about meetings with policymakers not being public.
They're required be law to be reported and accounted for. As I have
noted, many people have stereotypical notions about what it means
to "lobby" in Washington. Too many movies and TV, I imagine.

> Again, these might be stereotypes, but the general realities aren't that far
> off either.

Hugely far off, actually.

To compare: it's a little bit as if you took your understanding of
police work from watching American police action films. It's not wrong
to say that sometimes police rough people up, for example, but it
would be wrong to say that is the norm. Most police work is dull and
routine, and the sheer amount of paperwork an average policeman has to
do is so astounding that nobody ever even tries to depict it in film
or TV drama. You'd switch channels or walk out of the theater in boredom.

If you really think that (for example) the American Library
Association's Office for Information Technology Policy
(http://www.ala.org/offices/oitp) is having secret meetings with
senators and writing big checks, then the American entertainment
industry has done a huge disservice in educating people about all the
ways public policy can be shaped. Not that this should come as any
surprise.

(I'd love it, of course, if the American Library Association were
capable of writing big checks, but that's another story.)


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:

> I disagree - the null hypothesis is that the gain from lobbying isn't
> worth the cost, not that the gain is zero. (Cost includes far more
> than just monetary cost, of course.)

Ah, then the proper experiment would have been for Wikipedians not to
black out enwiki for a day and see how effective that was in changing
the debate?

Because, as you know, the blackout did entail a significant non-monetary costs.

The trick, of course, is that political experimentation of this sort
is similar to human experimentation generally -- the risk is that the
experiment, for all you learn from it, leads to negative consequences
down the line. My own view is that the blackout was unquestionably the
right thing to do, and I'm hugely proud to be associated in my own
small way with the people who took the risk of making our voices heard
this time.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Theo10011  wrote:
> Mike, I completely understand your point on this and where you are coming
> from. But you made a conflicting point yourself



> But as I saw it, we already
> made our voice heard? When we blacked out Wikipedia for 24 hours, and saw
> some measurable impact in the standing within congress, not to mention the
> coverage and support in the media.

Another important lesson about arguing issues in Washington is that
the fight is never over. The content companies have been at war with
technology companies for decades over copyright issues. The fact that
we were heard one day (or even one week) in 2012 is no basis for
complacency.

>It
> might not be a worthwhile use of the money, considering all the millions
> floating around on lobbyists between for-profit corporations, this might be
> more than what we should take on at the time?

I believe Kat Walsh deserves credit for pointing out that, while we
strive for NPOV in our encyclopedic content, the very existence of an
encyclopedia -- and a freely available one at that -- signifies a
political position. (Encyclopedists and librarians have known this for
some time.)

> Lobbying generally  sounds of
> closed door dealings, and large amounts of money spent on convincing
> politicians, in this case, convincing them to do the right thing.

That's certainly a common stereotype. In practice, however, and under
American law, those meetings get reported and publicized, and
nonprofit organizations that meet with policymakers are held strictly
accountable for what they do. And, it must be stressed, they can't
spend "large amounts of money" on "convincing politicians." We have
laws about that here.

>When a
> non-profit engages in it publicly, one that prides itself on being small and
> independent, it affects my perception of it. It might just be me, but I
> would rather see public statements, and actions like the blackout over
> lobbying any day.

This is not an either/or choice. Small, independent voices can be
heard, if you know what you're doing.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:

> There's a massive selection bias there! Of course the NGOs that do
> lots of lobbying think lobbying is a great idea, otherwise they
> wouldn't be doing it.

Not only that, but of course people who eat food and drink water to
sustain themselves are unlikely to give proper weight to Breatharian
points of view!

That pesky POV problem keeps rearing its noisy head wherever you look. ;)

I welcome your independent research project when you get it started.
Or anybody's, really. I suppose the null hypothesis is that one can
simply stay silent and wins the issue anyway. Obviously, I tend to
fall on the Gandhi/Martin Luther King side of that issue -- at least
I'm transparent about my biases.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[Mike Godwin]

geni writes:

> What is highly questionable is if it a remotely worthwhile use of
> money. If Google's lobbyists can't impact SOPA and the like what makes
> the foundation think our can?

geni, as you may know, I spent more than a decade in Washington
working on public-policy issues for non-profits (including EFF, the
Center for Democracy and Technology, and Public Knowledge). One of the
principal lessons of that experience was that public-interest
participation in policymaking debates added a lot of value precisely
because opponents couldn't write off a charity as simply being
interested in expanding its market or profits.

And the synergies between corporate lobbying and public-interest
policy initiatives -- on the occasions when their interests do line up
-- have a greater political impact than either faction can have
working alone.  If you've spent time on Capitol Hill, or meeting with
bureaucrats at federal agencies, you already know that a standard
tactic of your opponents is to marginalize you. So if you're Google,
the rap on you is that you're a quasi-monopoly spending Washington
dollars to maintain your position as a market leader. And if you're
ACLU or EFF, you're dismissed as arguing fringe issues that don't
represent the mainstream of American political thought.

But when Google (or Microsoft or Intel) come to policymakers and say
the same things that the nonprofit groups (EFF or ACLU or -- someday,
perhaps -- WMF) are telling them, it gets much, much harder for the
opposition to dismiss the message.

(The content companies already know this -- that's why they took such
pains to sign up a bunch of nonprofits as supporters of SOPA and PIPA,
even though many of the latter bailed when they realized MPAA was
perhaps not the best guide on these issues.)

None of this requires that any nonprofit spend the kind of lobbying
dollars that Google spends -- even if that were possible (and of
course it isn't remotely possible). The money WMF spends on something
like this is microscopic compared to that of for-profit corporation,
and pretty small even compared to other nonprofits. Nevertheless, a
nonprofit showing up and making its voice heard -- especially when its
arguments dovetail with those of much larger players like Google --
counts for a lot.  It can't be easily dismissed. It makes most
policymakers think twice.

At this point, I'll understand if you hit me with a [citation needed]
here, and I confess that what I'm telling probably is best classified
as "original research." But don't take my word for it -- talk to other
NGOs that work in the Washington policy community, and you'll find
plenty of confirmation of what I'm telling you here.


--Mike Godwin

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Re: [Foundation-l] just wondering, are we going to take down en.wikipedia.org?

[Mike Godwin]

Dan Collins writes:

> Hey guys,
>
> http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/204167-sopa-shelved-until-consensus-is-found
>
> The House decided they're going to stop bothering with this bill for a
> while, so while we should continue to think about what we will do when
> the time comes to protest this, that time is not right now. The bill
> can be reconsidered just as it was left off any time before the end of
> this congressional session, and the Senate still has a live bill, but
> the fact that HR 3261 is not being considered at the moment means that
> even if the Senate passes their bill, the House may refuse to consider
> that one too.

Dan, you're misreading the implications of what the story you link to
says. What's actually happening is that the House sponsors hope to
defuse opposition by delaying and slightly modifying SOPA. My
experience as a DC lawyer for much of my career strongly suggests that
there's no reason to suspend expressions of opposition to SOPA or PIPA
or the general effort by content companies to change the internet as
we know it. In my view, it is wholly incorrect to say "that time is
not right now."  Anything that the legislators can interpret as a lack
of resolve from the internet communities will encourage them to
resubmit SOPA or its equivalent in another form. The time for
protesting this is, in fact, right now.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

Ilario writes:

> We have two ways: to be passive or to be active. If we choose the
> passivity, it means that we can only organize a system of proxies like
> done in China or to organize some workarounds to make Wikipedia
> available to the person living in totalitarism.
>
> The Italian community has demonstrated that they would be active: I live
> in Switzerland, where Italian is a national language, and I can assure
> that the Swiss users have understood the problem and approved the strike.

I have great respect for Ray and others who worry that a strike
somehow undercuts the mission of the Wikimedia movement. But (and I'm
speaking only for myself here) I think Ilario's point here is valid --
sometimes the movement has to take active steps to draw attention to
the consequences of bad laws and bad government action. And a strike
is sometimes the best, most effective way to do that.

Ray's point about language groups not being limited to particular
countries (e.g., the Swiss who speak Italian, and the many nations
that speak English or Spanish) is an important one, but there is more
than one way to implement a strike. Properly implemented (by IP
ranges, for example) a strike could be limited, more or less, to a
single country.

One of the things I did some preliminary investigation about when I
was a staff member for Wikimedia Foundation was whether a strike of
the sort we've just seen would be workable. I came to the conclusion
that it would be, provided it was done with approval of the
Wikimedians in the nation or geographical territory where the bad law
or bad government action was taking place.

Again, speaking only for myself, I believe the Italian Wikimedians
made the right choice, and I believe that, so long as this tactic is
not overused, a strike may be the best and most effective response to
other anti-free-speech events in the future.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

Domas writes:

> Except that WMF as steward of the open information can roll any of that 
> blackout crap back.
> Primary mission is spreading the knowledge, and now it.wikipedia obviously 
> fails at it.

I believe this interpretation is both unfair and incorrect. The
Italian Wikipedians are trying to preserve a legal environment in
which spreading the knowledge is possible. Arguably, if the Italian
Wikipedians did *not* challenge this law, they would have failed in
their mission.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

Milos writes:

> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 22:32, Risker  wrote:
>> (As an aside, kudos to Milos' rapid response and ability to organize his own
>> local community in support of the concerns of our Italian counterparts.)
>
> Thanks! It should be noted that this the decision has been supported
> by 100% of WM RS Board members who voted (via email or phone). After
> the fifth support, we didn't search for the rest two voting members,
> as the statement already had majority.

I agree entirely with Risker, and I want to applaud the WM RS Board
members for responding so quickly in support of the Italian
Wikimedians on this issue. Milos, I missed your board's public
statement -- can you send me a link so I can share it in my networks?


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

Kat Walsh writes:

> I am happy to see the Italian community behind the opposition to the
> proposed law because I do think it's contrary to what Wikimedia does,
> and to see that there is consensus among the Italian community to do
> something drastic; there will be a far greater effect on the Italian
> wiki than a short blockage if bad laws are passed. (And part of
> me--the part that's been around for a billion years--is thrilled to
> see a community coming to such a decision on their own, via what seems
> like a reasonable process, without waiting for approval or support.)

Speaking only for myself, this precisely reflects my views. I applaud
the Italian Wikipedians' decision to challenge this law so directly.

> But I'm not sure about denying access completely for several days. I think 
> the action that
> was done may be too much, that maybe something could have been done to
> generate as much attention without cutting off access as much.

I understand Kat's doubts here, but my intuitive reaction, having
dealt with government censorship of various sorts for more than 20
years, is that more dramatic action is most likely to be effective in
persuading a government to change course. Governments that want to
censor -- like the USA, the United Kingdom (through its public-private
partnership), and now the Italian government -- tend to build up a lot
of inertia behind their policy choices. It's very hard to get a
government to change its mind. You have to challenge government
officials in a big, dramatic (and usually longer-lasting) way to get
their attention and make them responsive.

Of course this is an experiment -- we don't yet know whether the
Italian Wikipedians' efforts will be successful. But I think it's
probably better to dare too much than too little. I think the Italian
Wikipedians are courageous on this issue, and they totally have my
personal support.

I'd also like to +1 the thought that the very existence of Wikipedia
is not itself NPOV -- it reflects a philosophical and political
position, and one that just about all of us here agree with.

There are some governments that won't respond positively to any
protest effort -- the People's Republic of China is one of these, and
not just because Chinese readers have an alternative in Baidu. Let's
hope the government of Italy takes a better position than the PRC
would.


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Chapters

[Mike Godwin]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Theo10011  wrote:

> I still see it as a matter of outlook when you say, "WMF is a U.S. nonprofit
> and must (at minimum) operate under the U.S. rules", so is a German, French
> or a Swiss nonprofit, they must operate under the rules of their own
> country.

I believe this is precisely in agreement with what I posted.

>The rules might be more or less stringent but they all have to
> comply in order to function. What confounds these requirements is when they
> will also have to abide by US rules on top of their own national ones which
> doesn't even address accountability to the community itself by either
> party.

That was my point. If this were on a Facebook page, we'd have to
include in the relationships info that "It's complicated."


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Chapters

[Mike Godwin]

Theo writes:

> Second, it might be some form of elitist outlook if you think accountability
> standards for US Non-profits are more transparent and fiscally responsible
> than say somewhere in EU like Germany, France or the Switzerland. I assure
> you, they are existent, not-minimal and more restrictive than the US.

I'm not contradicting (or necessarily agreeing) with other things you
say in this message, but I want to point out that transnational
transference of charitable funds is complicated no matter which
direction the money is flowing in. The real argument (in my personal
view, and not as a current or former representative of WMF) is not
that the rules for U.S. nonprofits are "more transparent and fiscally
responsible" than elsewhere. It's that the WMF is a U.S. nonprofit and
must (at minimum) operate under the U.S. rules. When you're looking at
multiple nonprofits (chapters) in many nations, which operate under a
range of differing regulatory rules about international transfers of
charitable funds, it is a non-trivial challenge to come up with a
single joint fundraising model that meets every nation's requirements.

So, when we discuss this issue, it's important that we recognize that
it's not a question of whose rules are "better," whose motives are
better, who is more trustworthy, etc.  I believe it's appropriate for
everybody to continue Assuming Good Faith and to recognize that the
accountability/legality issue is a complicated one that requires a lot
of work to solve (and the solution may not be identical for every
cooperating chapter). Wikimedia Deutschland has invested a lot of
effort, for example, in developing a solution that works for the
German chapter, but the solution for another EU chapter (or for
chapters in the Global South or elsewhere) may look significantly
different.

This is all further complicated by WMF's obligation to obey U.S. rules.

I'm reminded of the quotation commonly (if not entirely accurately)
attributed to Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as
possible, but no simpler.” (See
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein .)


--Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] Welcome Tilman Bayer to the Wikimedia Foundation

[Mike Godwin]

Good news for both Tilman and WMF!


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 87, Issue 78

[Mike Godwin]

Sue Gardner writes:


> Would inviting Matt to join create perception problems?
> Probably not among external stakeholders because donors serving on
> boards is fairly normal in non-profit land, but yes among community
> members, because the community is (appropriately) a fierce defender of
> the independence of the projects. Should the board do what it thinks
> is best for the organization and the movement, even if its
> decisions/actions are unpopular? The board decided yes. Should the
> board try to separate the grant announcement from the Matt
> announcement to mitigate community anger? No, because that would be
> disingenuous. And, it might actually increase anger rather than
> mitigating it.
>

In my view, Sue has expressed the reasoning of the Board in a nutshell here.
Remember that the
Board recognized the risks of appointing Matt, and nevertheless appointed
him anyway. The community plays a large role in selecting Board members, and
it is appropriate to keep this in mind when voting on Board seats.
Nevertheless, I think the Board made a hugely intelligent and attentive
decision in appointing Matt, and I think it is best if the community
acknowledges and honors that decision, which comes in part from Board
members the community supports.


--Mike Godwin
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Re: [Foundation-l] Seat and Donations (SPLIT from: EFF & Bitcoins)

[Mike Godwin]

Michael Snow writes:

And for people who were worrying about the implications, I think setting

things up in stages is just as likely to make it look worse as to make it
> look
> better.
>

I think Michael's point here can't be overemphasized. It seems to me likely
that there would be just as much criticism and/or expressions of concern if
the Board appointment had been offset by a few months as there was when the
grant and the appointment occurred close in time. Perhaps there would have
been even more criticism, for the reasons Michael outlines. The fact that
the Board opted to go ahead with the appointment, knowing full well there
was a strong possibility their motivations would be questioned, is an
argument *in favor* of Matt's candidacy for a board appointment --
specifically, the Board felt Matt added so much value that it was worth the
risk that the appointment would be criticized as being a condition of the
grant.


--Mike Godwin
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Re: [Foundation-l] Amicus Brief Filed in Golan v. Holder: Fighting for the Public Domain

[Mike Godwin]

Kat Walsh writes:

I'm really happy to see us start getting involved in this kind of
> work; I think it too is part of fulfilling our mission. Thanks for
> your work on this, Geoff.
>

Chiming in here -- I'm very happy to see Geoff's announcement too. As Geoff
and a few others here know, I've favored WMF involvement in this case at
least since it was confirmed that the Supreme Court is going to hear it (and
of course I conferred with my EFF colleagues in the runup to the Supreme
Court's granting certiorari in Golan v. Holder). The case is centrally
important to the Wikimedia Foundation's continuing ability to offer free
knowledge and to preserve and provide access to important cultural and
artistic creative works.

I'm also pleased that another former employer of mine, the Information
Society Project at Yale Law School, is filing an amicus brief as well.
Here's the text of the Yale announcement (and a link to a PDF of the brief)
for those who are interested:

"Today, professors and fellows associated with the Information Society
Project at Yale Law School filed an amicus brief in *Golan v. Holder*, a
case that will be heard before the United States Supreme Court this fall. In
this brief, we argue that the Court should apply strict First Amendment
scrutiny to Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, a law that
allows works to be taken out of the public domain and placed back under
copyright protection. Although the plaintiffs in this case had stipulated
that intermediate scrutiny was the appropriate standard of review under the
First Amendment, we argue that when Congress abrogates a central
constitutional privilege—as it has done here, by stripping away a
traditional speech-protective contour of copyright law—Congress must satisfy
a more rigorous standard of review.

"The brief is available for download here:
http://yaleisp.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Golan-Amicus-Brief-filed.pdf

"Many thanks are due to everyone at the ISP who helped in writing,
researching, and thinking about this brief over the past two months!"


--Mike Godwin
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Re: [Foundation-l] Identity of Anonymous Wikipedia Editors Not Protected by First Amendment

[Mike Godwin]

SlimVirgin writes:

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 19:50, Fred Bauder  wrote:
> >
> > Identity of Anonymous Wikipedia Editors Not Protected by First Amendment
> >
> >
> http://ecommercelaw.typepad.com/ecommerce_law/2011/05/identity-of-anonymous-wikipedia-editors-not-protected-by-first-amendment.html
> >
> > Nothing unexpected.
>
> Related story about Twitter handing over personal details of someone
> accused of posting libel:
>
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8544350/Twitter-reveals-secrets-Details-of-British-users-handed-over-in-landmark-case-that-could-help-Ryan-Giggs.html
>

The way I typically explain the status of anonymity under U.S.
constitutional law is to point first to Lovell v. City of Griffin (1938),
the U.S. Supreme Court case that, among other things, underscores the First
Amendment's relationship to anonymous speech.  It's still the leading case
in this area. The Lovell case basically says you have the right to attempt
to engage in anonymous public speech, and you don't have an obligation
yourself to disclose who you are simply in order to speak. At the same time,
Lovell does *not* say you have a constitutional guarantee to *succeed* in
being anonymous.  In effect, that means that telcos and ISPs can be
compelled to provide whatever information they have on you, the anonymous
speaker, and the government may be able to use other investigatory
techniques to figure out who the anonymous speaker is anyway.

Typically, a service that values user privacy highly minimizes the amount of
private information it keeps about users, so that even if compelled to
comply with a lawful government order to disclose identifying information,
the service may not have much to disclose.

As you may imagine, commercial services tend to keep more identifying
information about users than noncommercial ones, typically because of
billing considerations.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action

[Mike Godwin]

David Gerard writes:

Over the last several years, the UK libel laws have been a strong
> consideration in WMF carefully maintaining *no* local business
> presence in the UK. The legal environment here is toxic for anyone who
> doesn't have to put up with it.
>

I've discussed this precise issue (informally) with Twitter's general
counsel, and we agree that the exposure for Twitter in the UK is
significantly different than it would be for the Wikimedia Foundation. I
mean, of course you can libel someone in 140 characters -- we've all seen it
happen. But the role of Twitter in relation to tweets is much more like
(say) a phone company's role than it is like WMF's or even Google's.

Twitter is an excellent company to put this analysis to the test -- it has
the legal resources to challenge a libel lawsuit (or a hundred, or a
thousand), and the role it plays as a communications medium is, if not
unique, then certainly pretty unusual.

I'd look at legal precedents involving SMS/texting in the UK -- that may
tell you what Twitter is thinking.

The risks for WMF in the UK (and, indeed, throughout the EU as a function of
UK membership in the European Union) remain pretty significant, largely for
all the reasons that Wikipedia is something different from Twitter.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 9:13 AM, aude  wrote:

>
>  Andrew Garrett writes:
>>
>> We might be growing, but I don't think anybody in the industry would
>>
>>> hesitate to say that we're still "small" and "running on a shoestring
>>> budget". The websites that we compete with run budgets in the hundreds
>>> of millions to billions of dollars.
>>>
>>>
>> This point can't be overstressed. Compared to organizations running the
>> other nine of the top ten websites, Wikimedia Foundation is miniscule,
>>
>
> Don't forget we have many thousands of volunteers. We are not like those
> other websites at all and don't think those are good comparisons.
>

I don't think anyone's forgotten the volunteers. But Andrew's remark
referred specifically to the "shoestring budget."  In that sense, the
Wikimedia Foundation is miniscule, compared to organizations running the
other top ten websites.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[Mike Godwin]

Andrew Garrett writes:

We might be growing, but I don't think anybody in the industry would
> hesitate to say that we're still "small" and "running on a shoestring
> budget". The websites that we compete with run budgets in the hundreds
> of millions to billions of dollars.
>

This point can't be overstressed. Compared to organizations running the
other nine of the top ten websites, Wikimedia Foundation is miniscule, and
should still be considered so even if/when the Foundation meets the goals
set in the strategic plan.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Licenses' biodiversity : my big disagreement with the Wikimedia usability initiative's software specifications

[Mike Godwin]

Gerard writes:



> When I talked to the Tropenmuseum about licensing their material, I asked
> Mike Godwin about this and I put this scenario explicitly to him. Material
> is licensed by a copyright holder, he can do it repeatedly in different
> ways
> for different levels of quality.
>


As I read this, Gerard represents my view accurately. It's important to
remember that one aspect of (most) free licenses is that the original
licensor retains many rights with regard to the copyrighted work.  Granting
multiple licenses to facilitate re-use in different contexts -- or different
media -- seems to me to be one solution to the problem that Birgitte raises,
which is that copyright is an area of law that treats very different media
as if they were the same (it's a "kludge," all right), which means there are
almost always going to be edge cases (statues, architectural plans, etc.) in
which meeting the explicit requirements of a particular free license (such
as CC-BY-SA) is going to be tricky.

That said, the efforts of Creative Commons to try to standardize on basic
licensing language have done very much to make free culture freer -- by
giving creators and licensors easier ways to talk about what kinds of rights
they are trying to grant, and by increasing "interoperability" among freely
licensed works.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to Foundation Website

[Mike Godwin]

I hope you mean "Vox" rather than "Fox."  I don't think "Fox" currently has
any connection to "Deus."


--Mike



On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Gerard Meijssen
wrote:

> Hoi Mike,
> You are a VIP who does not need to hide in any environment. I will be happy
> to hear your "Fox Dei" among the "Fox Populi".
> Thanks,
>   Gerard
>
> On 30 June 2010 16:49, Mike Godwin  wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 7:47 AM, Gerard Meijssen <
>> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hoi,
>>> I welcome many members of the Wikimedia staff joining us in Gdansk but
>>> PLEASE do not hide in a VIP environment like happened on previous
>>> Wikimanias.
>>>
>>
>> Dear Gerard,
>>
>> I've never known a VIP environment that would accept me as a member.
>>
>>
>> --Mike
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to Foundation Website

[Mike Godwin]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 7:47 AM, Gerard Meijssen
wrote:

> Hoi,
> I welcome many members of the Wikimedia staff joining us in Gdansk but
> PLEASE do not hide in a VIP environment like happened on previous
> Wikimanias.
>

Dear Gerard,

I've never known a VIP environment that would accept me as a member.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to Foundation Website

[Mike Godwin]

Sam Klein writes:

I do think there are more risks inherent in this sort of growth than
> are listed in the 'potential risks' section -- for instance,
> "inability to acculturate new staff due to aggressive growth" -- and
> we should be alert to these risks to avoid them.
>

Just to be clear about this, I read Sam here as saying something like "there
is a potential risk that we will be unable to acculturate new staff as we
grow."  This of course is true -- and it's even true when growth is slow!
But in practice the Foundation takes this risk very seriously, and takes
pains to promote the acculturation of new staff, not just to Foundation
culture but to the larger community. One way we do this is by sending new
staff to Wikimania, if it makes sense to do so,  and/or promoting new
staff's interaction with the community in other ways. Attendees at Wikimania
this year will see a number of staff who haven't been there before --
everyone is urged to engage staff members in conversations about our work
together, or other topics of common interest.  (I'll be there too -- first
Wikimania since Taiwan!)


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Communication

[Mike Godwin]

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Nathan  wrote:

> You can argue, and have argued, that participants should know
> this already or can easily discover the relevant information with some
> digging. But why not spare them the effort? It's fully possible that
> the folks most interested in the specific content are no longer paying
> close attention, or will be discouraged enough to just give up. Is
> posting a link to a useful description of put-up procedures really a
> liability for the WMF?
>

I see nothing preventing the community from adopting a template including
information about put-up procedures.  If the community were to do this, it
would not create liability for WMF. I believe David Gerard has suggested
something similar.

>
> The idea here is that some communication is not necessarily ideal
> communication, and we can acknowledge that an effort was made while
> still asking for just a little bit more.
>

I'm pleased, of course, that a few people do acknowledge that the effort was
made.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Communication

[Mike Godwin]

Nathan writes:

When the WMF makes a
> decision to intervene in the projects, full and informative
> communication isn't just a nice-if-you-can-get-it side benefit of
> dealing with a small company - it's essential to maintaining the
> fabric of a massively participatory and cooperative endeavor.
>

I think if you look at what we did with regard to the Gallimard takedowns --

1) Consulting with French legal experts before taking any action
2) Compelling Gallimard to narrow and specify their takedown demands
3) Enlisting community members to implement the takedowns
4) Including (though not required to do so) contact and identifying
information for Gallimard
5) Providing a complete list of what Gallimard demanded to be taken down

-- you see both a high degree of deliberation on our part (we didn't simply
jump to comply) and an effort to make clear to the community what we were
doing and why, and to involve the community, even at the same point in time
at which we followed through on the takedown demands.

You may remember than Yann originally asserted some kind of double standard
(maybe that we're more afraid of French publishers than of British
museums?), and Andre suggested that we simply (and fearfully) comply with
facially invalid takedown requests. Neither notion is true. Somehow those
notions didn't exactly feel cooperative.

I think it's essential to maintaining the fabric of a massively
participatory and cooperative endeavor that one first give some attention to
the full facts of how we responded, rather than jumping to (negative)
conclusions about our motivations and interests.  My view is that, to the
extent possible, I want to minimize the exposure of community members to
legal risk even as I'm doing the same for the Foundation.  Partly this means
adhering to the framework of the applicable laws, including copyright laws
-- so, yes, we will normally comply with a formally correct takedown notice,
just as we will comply with a formally correct "put up" demand.  We'll also
help targeted community members find independent legal counsel when we can,
and we'll support chapters that seek to provide professional legal advice to
the community as well. We do generally have to obey the rules, however, and
we didn't create them.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 8:05 AM, Andre Engels  wrote:

>
> Surely having a known defense strategy would beat having no defense
> strategy at all, which basically is the situation now.


I'm afraid I must deny that we have no defense strategy.


>  But why not support the community in issuing
> counter-claims, by telling them that the possibility is there, and
> what the consequences are (both the positive one that the WMF is then
> likely to re-instate the material, and the negative one that the one
> doing the claim will be the one liable to get sued if the other party
> decides to do so).
>

If I were you, I would not assume that this is something WMF would never do.
As has been made clear before now, we consulted with French lawyers before
complying with the takedown notice in this instance, to assess how seriously
to take the copyright claims.


> The situation now is that a single take down notice will have the WMF
> take down the material, basically saying to the community "we have to
> do this".


I disagree with this characterization of the situation.

How do you expect people to issue counter-claims if they
> don't even know about the possibility of doing so?
>

Are you saying that the possibility of responding to a DMCA (or equivalent)
takedown notice has been a secret until now? My experience has been the
converse -- that any copyright advocate who knows enough to track copyright
dates and to post dozens or hundreds of texts to Wikisource is likely to
know the basics of takedown notices and counter-claims, or is able quickly
to determine on his own what can be done in response.


> I'm sorry, but I am getting more and more the feeling that for the
>  board and the executive the foundation is more important than the
> projects.


This seems disingenuous to me. You seem to be saying that all collaborative
projects must provide you with legal representation and advice.  I'm pretty
sure the Free Software Foundation does not do this, and that Creative
Commons doesn't do it either.  There are organizations that do provide such
services, like EFF (my former employer).  It seems to me to be a mistake to
try to turn the Wikimedia Foundation into another EFF, or to say that "the
Foundation is more important than the projects" because it does not try to
be EFF.

To me, this answer is an example to that. Surely, it is easy
> enough to put an answer in such wordings that the likelihood of losing
> such a suit (in the already unlikely circumstance that such a suit
> would actually be brought forward) are negligible.


The issue is not the losing of such a suit. We'd likely win it. The issue is
the cost of winning it.

>
> > There is plenty of generic legal advice about how to respond to takedown
> > notices. A little Googling will turn up some for you.
>
> So that's the foundation's reaction?


I'm avoiding giving you legal advice while dropping broad hints about where
you can find good legal advice for free. Of course, I can't compel you to
take the hint.


> If you don't like us taking down
> material, just find out yourself what can be done about that - and
> then find out how that something is done that can be done about that?
>

Other Wikimedians don't seem to find this as tricky as you do.


> You seem to be more tightly bedded with not only valid but also
> invalid copyright claimers than I ever had thought possible.
>

This seems to be an inference that is insupportable on the basis of the
facts you have.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

Ray Saintonge writes:

An important point; we musn't force the WMF lawyer into a conflict of
> interest
>

The issue is only partly conflict of interest, and it often isn't that. It's
primarily that WMF is not insured to give legal advice to community members.
We run an encyclopedia, not a free legal clinic.  (By comparison, when I
worked for EFF, I was actually empowered to give free legal advice to people
who called in for help.)

It really feels good to be able to say "Make my day."  More of us should
> try it.
>

You'll be pleased, I know, to know that I do get to say something similar
quite frequently. There are plenty of bogus legal threats directed to WMF.

John Vandenberg writes:

In cases like this, I think it would help if the WMF lawyers would
> tell the community, bluntly, that they can't assist the community in
> the matter, with a quick overview of why they cant assist.
>

See above.

It's also no secret that we have referred community members to lawyers in
the past because we could not represent or counsel those members. This is
what we did with regard to NPG.


> Is that possible without putting WMF lawyers in a tight spot?
>

Sometimes. Sometimes not. (The issue is not so much putting lawyers in a
tight spot as it is one of making WMF more vulnerable, e.g., by revealing
defense strategies.)

Peter Gervai writes:

Or we can reasonably expect them to ask for real legal advice from (or
> paid by) the WMF and _then_ accept the _known_ risk to file a
> counter-notice.
>

What happens if they follow the legal advice from WMF and then face
liability anyway? (This sometimes happens even when the best advice is
given.)  WMF is not insured against the malpractice lawsuit that community
members might bring in that case.

John Vandenberg writes:

.. find generic legal advice ... or ...
>
> .. find a lawyer among the community who can help.
>

There is plenty of generic legal advice about how to respond to takedown
notices. A little Googling will turn up some for you.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 2:43 AM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:

>
> It seems then that there is a question of jurisdiction involved.  It has
> been my long held understanding that the Wikimedia projects have operated
> under the laws of the United States, and that WMF has been consistent in its
> view that chapters are not responsible for the contents of the projects. Why
> then do we now compromise this by relying on what the French courts might
> say if the takedown notices are issued under US law?
>

It turns out that foreign copyright judgments are more easily enforceable
against U.S. entities in  United States courts than other kinds of
judgments, due to the copyright lobby's efforts to shape international
copyright and enforcement treaties.

Counter-notices would also be produced under US law.  There is no
> requirement that the person who files a counter-notice be the same person
> who posted the original material.  The original takedown notice needs to be
> a public document in order to enable any person considering a counter-notice
> to form the required good faith belief that the material was taken down
> because of a mistake or misidentification, or to challenge whether the
> takedown notice was compliant with all the requirements of such a notice.
>  Thus I would suggest that the notices are not privileged in the way that
> other correspondence or discussions would be.
>

We made the details of the notice public, as Nathan has already shown.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:08 PM, John Vandenberg  wrote:

>
> It sounds like you are suggesting that there is ongoing dialog between
> WMF and Gallimard.. ?
>

There is not.


> And what is the process _after_ the takedown?
>

The takedown is normally the end of the process. Unless you are asking
something else. Please be aware that I cannot offer you legal advice about
how to respond to a takedown. There are a number of resources online,
including I believe on Wikipedia (or linked from there), that may give you
pointers. One of the few put-up notices I have received was perfectly
executed by a non-lawyer Wikipedian.


> Did the National Portrait Gallery not provide a properly crafted take
> down notice?
>

That's correct.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Office action

[Mike Godwin]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:08 PM,  wrote:

>
>
> What harm do you foresee in replacing deleted pages with a declaration like 
> YouTube uses, "This Video has been deleted
>
> based on a copyright claim by The Disney Corporation" ?  And then an 
> extension of "If you believe this is public domain material
>
> then restore the page and include this disclaimer blah blah blah"
>
>
We aimed to do something like this.  Can you say what you dislike about the
current notices, which include the contact information for Gallimard?


--Mike
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[Foundation-l] Office action

[Mike Godwin]

Klaus Graf writes:

For me there is no reason to believe that Mr. Godwin is a good lawyer.
>

I certainly don't require that you believe I'm a good lawyer. I'd be a very
poor lawyer indeed, however, if I invited publishers to embroil us in
expensive copyright lawsuits that we might not win when both U.S. and
international law provide a mechanism for sidestepping such lawsuits.

I realize that some people think it would be very thrilling if the Wikimedia
Foundation were to take on such lawsuits to vindicate the views of
contributing editors who themselves are not willing to engage directly in
litigation with overreaching publishers. And it would be thrilling, I
suppose, but not in a very responsible way.


> If he receives a formal (blah-blah) correct take-down-notice he will
> take OFFICE ACTION.
>

Yes, it is correct that I will comply with a DMCA (or equivalent) takedown
notice.  In this respect, I'm like just about every lawyer everywhere who
represents a service provider.  Perhaps they are all bad lawyers, but at
least I'm in good company if they are.


> It was clearly un-lawful to take down the TU Munich logo which isn't
> protectable according German copyright law but WMF has done so.
>

I'm unaware of any takedown notice regarding "the TU Munich logo." Perhaps
you are referring to some action taken by my predecessor.


> It is a shame that WMF hasn't a policy of TRANSPARENCY regarding
> office actions. The right of the community to get all information
> cannot be overruled by Mr. Godwin's personal opinions about secret
> things.
>

In the world outside this mailing list, the fact that I'm responding to this
extent to these criticisms would itself be taken as proof of transparency,
not disproof.

If WMF or it's god-like counsel (who wasn't able to accept critics
> since I am reading this list) has taken office action - there is no
> way to appeal.
>

I invite informed criticism.  In fact, I love it -- it's exceedingly helpful
to receive thoughtful, informed criticism.  I'm sure you share my belief in
this, Klaus, and I look to you as a model of how to respond to thoughtful
criticism.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

Gerard writes:

Hoi,
> When I read:  "Wikisource content in the French language targets the French
> public, and therefore, under French conflict of laws principles, the
> copyright law of France applies to this content." I do read the French
> public. Wikisource does not target the French public per se.
>

I agree with you about this. Unfortunately, that turns out to be an
inadequate argument when it comes to justifying noncompliance with a
takedown notice.

We consulted with French counsel on the question of compliance, and neither
they nor we believed there was a strong probability that French court would
invalidate the takedown notice on the grounds that Wikisource does not
target the French public in particular.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Nathan  wrote:

>
> Yann suggests that he (and the Wikisource community) did not know
> about the takedown in a timely manner; anyone not watching the files
> or the deletion logs might have missed it if the only note was in the
> deletion log.


But of course, the deletion log was not the only notice. And Yann Forget
knew about the deletions at the time they occurred.


>  If you
> can't communicate certain facts during negotiations, why not do so
> afterwards?
>

Sometimes you can. I just did. But of course sometimes you can't, for
reasons I've already outlined. (There's nothing magical about the passage of
time that eliminates the disincentive effect of disclosing negotiations.)


> There is some tension built into this general issue, though; Cary
> advises that the fr.wikisource project needs to make its own decisions
> about what content to allow, based on a local interpretation of
> applicable law -- and then the Foundation deletes content without (a)
> providing advice on what is acceptable and what isn't and (b) without
> referring to the local decisions the project was advised to take.


I'm not sure what advice you think it is even theoretically possible that
the Foundation could have offered.  Are you suggesting that the Foundation
is acting as the lawyer for everyone who posts content to Wikisource?  There
are obvious reasons that is not a sustainable or feasible model.

You seem to have the impression that the Foundation staff directly deleted
the content. Actually, I shared the list with Cary, who shared the list with
community members who implemented the takedown. (I deleted no content
myself.) So you can see why the whole notion that the takedown wasn't shared
with the community seems flatly wrong to me.  We absolutely engaged
community members in implementing the takedown. Yann seems to suggest that
our actions have been some kind of big secret. The reality, however, is that
we did nothing in secret, and that Yann in fact has known what we did for
quite a while now.  We even made it trivially easy to contact Gallimard and
complain about the takedown.  But I do understand that it is easier to
complain about WMF than it is to pursue Gallimard directly, even though
doing the latter might be a more effective choice.

I'll note also that the real complaint, as I perceive it, isn't really that
we didn't communicate what we were doing. The real complaint is that we
actually complied with a formally correct takedown notice, consistent with
longstanding policy.  Now that it's clearer that we really couldn't make any
other choice but to comply, consistent with our fiduciary responsibilities,
the need to complain shifts to another target. I hope I may be forgiven for
believing that if we had put our compliance with Gallimard's takedown notice
in a banner on every project page, we'd still face complaints -- likely from
the very same people -- for other ostensible reasons.

In short, the real unhappiness here is that we complied with a formally
correct takedown notice. All the rest is distraction, IMHO.  But as a matter
of official policy, we will comply with such notices as we have in the past.
Other contributors have responded to our takedowns by reposting the content
with appropriate affidavits ("put-up notices"), and we've left the content
up in spite of followup demands that we remove it.  I do not believe such
legally correct responses are beyond the ability of contributors to
Wikisource or other projects.

I'm
> not sure how this can be resolved, but surely its a legitimate source
> for grumbling and not grounds for a personally accusatory response
> from the WMF.
>

I'm not sure what you're perceiving as "a personally accusatory response" --
I've simply shared the facts as I understand them.  (Did you think Yann
Forget's posting was not "personally accusatory"? I noticed that Cary and I
are mentioned by name, personally.) I do share as much as I can, within the
constraints of law and professional ethics. I am forbidden to step beyond
those constraints.

I don't have much to say beyond this.  But I do ask that you not assume
anything about the takedowns without looking at them yourself.  And I'll
respond privately to any queries about how we proceeded, if I can.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 1:45 PM,  wrote:

>
>
> It's not about what you cannot do, it's about what you CAN do.
> In light of the evidence that some of the works are in the public domain in
> France, are you willing to stop taking down the material?  That's the real
> issue here.
>
> We can simply repost the material, but it's moot, if you're going to keep
> taking it down.
>
>
Actually, you misunderstand the law of copyright notice-and-takedown.  If
you repost the content, compliant with applicable notice-and-takedown law,
and accompany the reposting with a sworn affidavit that you have the right
to repost it, we won't take it down.

Please be advised that I can't be your lawyer in this matter -- I represent
WMF -- but I am certain that any lawyer you retained would advise you how to
go about reposting material removed pursuant to a formally correct takedown
notice (which is what we received).

It's really, really helpful to me if, prior to recommending what WMF should
do in response to a takedown notice, you familiarize yourself with the
relevant law. If you had done so in this instance, you would know already
that we're not "going to keep taking it down."


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 12:21 PM, Yann Forget  wrote
>
>
> I didn't know you narrowed Gallimard's takedown demand. AFAIK you
> never informed me nor Wikisource about this.
>

We cannot inform you about all the details communicated in an ongoing
negotiation with parties threatening us with litigation.  Apart from whether
doing so would be consistent with legal ethics, it would also provide a
disincentive for complaining parties to negotiate with us at all.

In fact, you didn't inform Wikisource about the details of Gallimard's
> demand.
> I received Gallimard's letter only one month _after_ the works were
> deleted on Wikisource.
>

In fact, the note for every takedown specified that the takedown occurred
because of a Gallimard demand, and it listed Gallimard's contact
information. This was done at the time of the takedown, not one month later.


> Happy to hear that. It would have been much better if you would have
> informed the Wikisource community about it.
>

It would be a delightful world if all legal negotiations could be shared
with everyone instantly. We do not live in that world, however. What we did
do, at my direction, was make clear at the time of the takedown who was
responsible for the takedown demand and how to contact the entity
responsible.  At some point, it seems fair to expect concerned individuals
-- especially those who already know about the complaint -- to be aware of
public notices about what was taken down and why. You seem to be complaining
here because you knew about the Gallimard takedown demands, but didn't
bother to track the followup to those demands on Wikisource. This is a
shame, because we did try to make it easy for you to know what had happened.


>
>
> Partly false, misleading at the minimum.
>

Not false at all.


> Some of the deleted works are in the public domain in France.
>

You're still missing the point. NPG did not send a formal takedown notice.


> At least half of them are in the public domain world wide, except in
> France.
> These are published on many web sites, including the National French
> Library.
>

Please understand that if you have problems with French copyright law,
there's nothing I can do about that from here in California.


> Well, I am now in India, so I am not sure how much French law in relevant.
>

Whether Gallimard would prevail in an infringement lawsuit based on these
works is irrelevant to the question of how to respond to a takedown notice.


>  What I ask is that you inform _the Wikisource project hosted by
> Wikimedia Foundation_ about _WMF official legal policy_, whatever is
> that policy.
>

Official legal policy is to comply with properly crafted takedown notices.
This has been our policy since long before I arrived at WMF. I'm surprised
that you didn't know this before now.



--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource

[Mike Godwin]

Yann Forget writes:

>
> In addition, I receive a personal letter, as "the main editor" of
> these texts, according to Gallimard. We didn't receive any information
> from the Wikimedia Foundation, and I know the details only because I
> have been personally involved.
>

Yann seems to be suggesting here that the Wikimedia Foundation did not
notify him about the Gallimard takedown, but at the same time Yann
acknowledges that he knew about the Gallimard takedown. It is precisely
because we knew Yann knew about Gallimard's takedown demand (it wasn't a
"request") that we did not send him additional correspondence to inform him
about something he already knew about. I still have in my email storage
correspondence with Yann regarding this event from March of this year -- it
seems odd to have Yann complaining that he didn't know enough about it.

Furthermore, when we noted in the takedown who was demanding the takedown
(Editions Gallimard) *and we further listed their contact information* so
that francophone Wikimedians who disagreed with the takedown demand could
make their feelings known to Gallimard. We did this at the very beginning of
the takedown process, which we are obligated by international law to obey.

>
> Now three months later, we didn't receive any
> information from the Foundation about this, and the texts are still
> deleted.


Yann seems here to say that some unnamed group did not know about the
takedown. We posted the takedown information publicly. Yann in fact knew
about it from the beginning. What's more, we listened to Yann's feedback,
including claims that some of the material Gallimard demanded taken down was
material they had no right to make such demands about. We narrowed
Gallimard's takedown demand accordingly.  Yann knows this.


> Many contributors are obviously not very happy, and feel that
> the Foundation submitted to the pressure of a commercial publisher.
> Comparing with the National Portrait Gallery affair on Commons, it
> looks like a double standard was applied.
>

I strongly suspect that any contributors who feel as Yann says they feel are
relying on mistaken information and assumptions.  We absolutely did resist
the demands of Gallimard within the full extent that French law allows. We
retained French counsel who represented us in discussions with Gallimard,
and we forced Gallimard to make their demands both more specific and
narrower. The "pressure of a commercial publisher" played no role. (A
noncommercial entity making the same legal demand would be entitled to the
same takedown, assuming that the formalities were met.)

Comparing the National Portrait Gallery affair suggests lack of knowledge
about the underlying copyright issues involved. The NPG dispute involved art
works that unquestionably were no longer protected by copyright according to
the law of most signatories of international copyright treaties. The NPG
actually knows this, and did not press any legal challenge, likely because
of uncertainty whether their anomalous theory of copyright protection for
digitized centuries-old artworks would be upheld even by British courts. The
Gallimard case is fundamentally different, since most of the works they
demanded taken down were asserted to be modern works that are clearly within
the period of French copyright protection.

Just a few days before these texts were deleted, I asked Cary what was
> the official opinion of Wikimedia Foundation about texts which are in
> the public domain in USA, but not in France. I was told that "the
> community is entitled to decide by itself".
>

Cary is correct that the Wikimedia Foundation is not purporting to give you
legal advice about copyright and the public domain.  We're not your
lawyers.  For that, you are best served by consulting French legal counsel.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Legal requirements for sexual content -- help, please!

[Mike Godwin]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 8:06 PM, Still Waterising  wrote:

>
> However, when that image is selected for reuse (and not in an automated
> way, but by an actual human) on an article page, user page, or off-wiki that
> person also becomes a secondary producer.
>

Can you point me to which case you are citing in support of this
interpretation?


> 2257B(g) simply refers to 2257(h) above, so I'm not sure why Mike even
> mentioned it.
>
> (g) As used in this section, the terms “produces” and “performer” have the
> same meaning as in section 
> 2257
>  
> (h)
>  of
> this title.
>

You probably meant to type "2257A(g)" there. It's relevant because the
subject matter of 2257A is not the same as that of 2257. The statutes
operate the same way, although they cover different things, so must be read
together when determining whether definitional exemptions apply.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Legal requirements for sexual content -- help, please!

[Mike Godwin]

wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk writes:

Across the world the "Nobody is home" argument is quickly running out of
> steam. Google execs sentenced to 6 months in Italy, LimeWire guilty for
> its user's piracy, and blog owner found liable for user submitted libel.
>

It helps to actually read the stories and understand the cases. The Google
execs were found guilty even though they quickly responded to a complaints
and removed the offending video. In other words, they didn't make the
"nobody is home" argument.

Limewire is a contributory-infringement case that has nothing to do with
publisher liability. (Limewire distributed software.)

And the blog owner actually hasn't been found liable for user-submitted
libel in the Register story published. As the story is reported, the blog
owner has merely been told that moderation of content runs the risk of
*creating* liability by removing the exemptions for mere hosts. The decision
is regarding a pre-trial motion. In other words, the case has precisely the
opposite meaning of what wiki-list writes here, since it focuses on the
risks of moderation, not the risks of non-moderation.

But don't take my word for it -- read the links yourself!

>
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/26/google_italy_trial
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/18/limewire_copyright_ruling
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/08/user_comments_ruling
>
>
I wouldn't endorse wiki-list's unusual interpretation of the cases, as
summed up here:


> the days of the internet being a free for all are coming to an end. If
> websites won't take responsibility, at least to the extent of having a
> policies in place which are enforced, then others will make it for them,
>  by disabling access to the site.
>

With regard to the Google case, at least, it looks like taking
responsibility doesn't protect you, and with regard to the libel case,
moderation increases your risk of liability by undermining your statutory
exemption.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Legal requirements for sexual content -- help, please!

[Mike Godwin]

Stillwater Rising writes:

Hosting these images without 18 USC 2257(A) records, in my opinion, is a *
> no-win* situation for everyone involved.
>

This raises the obvious question of how you interpret 18  USC 2257A(g),
which refers back to 18 USC 2257(h) (including in particular 18 USC
2257(h)(2)(B)). I'll be interested in hearing your thoughts about the
interaction and interpretation of these related statutes (as well as of the
interaction between 18 USC 2257(h) generally and 47 USC 230 and 231,
referenced within section 2257.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] "Filtering" ourselves is pointless

[Mike Godwin]

Yann Forget writes:


2010/5/10 Mike Godwin :
>
> > Can you point me to major media entities that have accepted the notion
> that
> > "Fox News was correct"?
> >
> > This statement strikes me as identifying a theoretical hazard rather than
> an
> > actual outcome.
> >
> > --Mike
>
> Reading this
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:News_regarding_the_sexual_content_purge
> I think that you are wrong, and that David and others are right.
>

I will stipulate that if you consider the Register or blogs a "major media
entity," I'm wrong.  I'm sure you don't mean to suggest that the BBC article
asserted that Fox News was correct.


--Mike
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[Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)

[Mike Godwin]

Tim Starling writes:

It's a proposal which only really makes sense when analysed from the
> libertarian end of this debate. It's not a compromise with the rest of
> the spectrum.
>

That's correct. That was intentional. A libertarian proposal that attempts
to adhere to NPOV and reduces general noise about censorship, allowing us to
focus on images that are actually used, won't please organizations like Fox
News or people like Larry Sanger who are determined to censor or destroy
Wikipedia. But my suggestion wasn't derived from ideology so much as
practicality. (I'm not an ideological libertarian.)

"So to return to Mike's proposal: it's only the libertarians who value
educational value above moral hazard, and they're not the ones you've
got to compromise with. To a conservative, a claim of educational
value does not negate a risk of moral turpitude. By optionally hiding
images which have a claim of educational value, however dubious the
claim, you please nobody."

That's a feature, not a bug. If there is a compromise that "pleases" some
factions but not others, it's not exactly a compromise, is it?

My point is that is nice to be able to say, with regard to a disputed image,
that it is used in an article, or 10 articles, or 100 articles across
projects. Being able to say such a thing is a useful answer to a precise
subset of criticisms, but it does not purport to be an answer to all
criticisms. So while I appreciate your general taxonomy of political views,
I think it is grounded in a mistaken assumption about the purpose of what I
posted.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] "Filtering" ourselves is pointless

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:11 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

>
> We were going to have nonsense articles in Fox whatever we do - that's
> the way Fox is. Now we have an article on the BBC News website (a very
> respected news outlet, unlike Fox) saying there is infighting in
> Wikipedia which we wouldn't have had if Jimmy hadn't acted. I'm far
> more concerned about the BBC article than I would be any Fox story.
>

BBC got the story from Fox. There would have been a Fox story regardless,
and I wouldn't assume that BBC would not have picked up the more
sensationalistic story that Fox was hoping to run.


--Mike, who's been doing this media-ecology stuff for a couple of decades
now ;)
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Re: [Foundation-l] "Filtering" ourselves is pointless

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:36 PM, David Gerard  wrote:

>
> > Did you draw that conclusion?
>
> Your equivocation on this point is wearisome.
>

I don't know what you mean by "equivocation" here.  I'm not equivocating, so
far as I know. Perhaps I'm just not understanding what you mean by "this
point."


> Jimbo's actions were
> ridiculously damaging for *no gain whatsoever*.
>

I understand that you believe this.  But it depends on what you mean by
"damage" and on what you mean by "no gain."  The thesis has been advanced
here that Jimmy's actions somehow damaged us in the view of "the whole
world." I'm only questioning that particular thesis. Whether "the whole
world" would have had a higher opinion of Wikipedia if Fox had run the story
they were trying to manufacture -- instead of the lame stories they have run
-- is also an interesting proposition, but I hope you will understand why I
don't find that proposition particularly credible.


--m
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Re: [Foundation-l] "Filtering" ourselves is pointless

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:31 PM, David Levy  wrote:

> > Can you point me to major media entities that have accepted the notion
> that
> > "Fox News was correct"?
>
> I'm referring to the conclusion that one, in my assessment, would draw
> upon encountering Jimbo's remarks first-hand, with or without reading
> Fox's subsequent reports on the matter.
>

Did you draw that conclusion?


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] "Filtering" ourselves is pointless

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:23 PM, David Levy  wrote:

>
> Instead, Jimbo has essentially announced to the world that Fox News
> was correct.  And until we purge our servers of every "graphic image,"
> we knowingly retain our self-acknowledged state of indecency.
>

Can you point me to major media entities that have accepted the notion that
"Fox News was correct"?

This statement strikes me as identifying a theoretical hazard rather than an
actual outcome.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] "Filtering" ourselves is pointless

[Mike Godwin]

David Levy writes:

>
> Agreed.  As some predicted, Fox News has cited Jimbo's actions as
> validation that its earlier claims were correct.  And because any
> "graphic images" remain, this means that we're aware of an egregious
> problem and have made only a token effort to address it.
>
> Essentially, we've gone from alleged smut peddlers pleading our
> innocence to self-acknowledged smut peddlers flaunting our guilt.
>
> It was an enormous mistake to respond to this "news" organization as
> though it possessed a shred of credibility or integrity.
>
>
The hidden assumption here -- an incorrect assumption, in my view -- is that
there is some universe of possibilities in which Fox News would not have
cited Jimbo's *inaction* as validation that it was correct. I infer from
this comment that you imagine that if Jimbo had not intervened as he did,
there would be no such story from Fox News.  My response is, if you think
this, then you don't know Fox News.

Fox News (or at least this reporter and her editors) have dedicated
themselves to damaging Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. This is a
given, and it is evident from their behavior. *Any* followup story would
have demonstrated what these days in the U.S. we are calling "epistemic
closure" -- all results will be interpreted as validation of cherished
theories.

It is perfectly appropriate, it seems to me, for the community to
second-guess Jimmy (or me, or anyone else working to protect the projects).
But I don't think we should implicitly or explicitly embrace the theory
that, had Jimmy not intervened, there would be no story, or a better story.
 My personal view is that the story Fox News wanted to tell would have been
worse, but even if you disagree about that, let's not pretend there would
have been no story at all.



--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>
> > Obviously, this notion is too cute to actually be helpful, but I thought
> I'd
> > share it.
>
> It has an enormously cute strawman answer:  If you don't want to see
> images which aren't used inline in another wiki, don't look at commons
> at all!   By definition any image in use in a Wikipedia is available
> outside of commons. :)
>

Right. The difference is that instead of simply telling people not to go to
Commons, you could say "go to Commons, but if you only want to see images
that have been deemed to be worth including in an article, click here."

Back in the old days, we used to call this "user empowerment" (I actually
coined the term in mid-1990s for EFF).



> Don't forget that a major reason that people look at commons is
> because Wikipedia articles will usually only have a few illustrations,
> for editorial/flow reasons.  If you're mostly interested in visual
> details about the subject of your interest you'll follow the commons
> link from the Wikipedia article.   ... but in that case your suggested
> image hiding wouldn't be helpful.
>

It might be helpful for people who are worried about seeing images that have
merely been dumped in Commons.  Presumably those who want to see all the
images could click the appropriate option and see all unlinked images as
well.

Remember that the goal here (not my personal goal, but the goal of some) is
less for a "perfect solution" than for a way of avoiding superfluous dumped
images that don't have educational value.  My suggestion is inelegant (there
are no elegant solutions), but also content-neutral (the umpteenth unlinked
image of Lincoln or Gandhi would be blocked too).  That way, the only
offensive images we'd have to defend would be the ones that the community
deemed appropriate to include in an article (a category of images that I
personally am generally willing to defend, regardless of the type of
content).


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:

>
> And what about choosing "Would you like to see uncategorized images?"
>
> And the same for "cultural censorship": Is your culture brave enough
> to gamble would you be horrified by seeing a penis or Muhammad or not?
>

I'm not sure I understand either question.  The proposal I suggest would
allow you to see uncategorized images if you want to. It would also allow
you to see a penis or Muhammed if you want to (or in encyclopedic articles
about penises or Muhammed images).


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Mike Godwin]

David Goodman writes:

I have been taking an extreme anticensorship position, but I would
> consider this acceptable.  People certainly do have the right as
> individuals to select what they want to see.  It is not censorship,
> just a display option Such  display options  could be expanded--I
> would suggest an option to initially display the lead paragraph only,
> of articles in certain categories.
>

I just had a thought -- what if it were possible for a user to categorically
block views of any images that are not linked to in any project's article
pages?  Presumably, those Commons images that are found in articles are
relevant and appropriately encyclopedic (speaking generally -- I also assume
there are some exceptions). Images that were just "dumped" to Commons
without being associated with any particular article would still be
available to those who were looking for them -- perhaps to complement a
particular article that needs illustration -- but the umpteenth superfluous
porn shot (or unconnected Muhammed image) would be invisible to those who
chose this option.

Obviously, this notion is too cute to actually be helpful, but I thought I'd
share it.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Mike Godwin]

Geoffrey Plourde writes:

Wouldn't regulating content mean abdicating the role of webhost, which would
> call Section 230 into question?
>

 Mere removal of content posted by others does not create a Section 230
problem or a problem under equivalent provisions elsewhere in the law. A
guideline or policy urged by the Wikimedia Foundation and
adopted/implemented by the volunteer-editor community would not create such
a problem either.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

Greg Maxwell writes:

At the same time, and I think we'll hear a similar message from the
> EFF and the ALA,  I am opposed to these organized "content labelling
> systems".  These systems are primary censorship systems and are
> overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to
> restrictions against their will. I'm sure these groups will gladly
> confirm this for us, regardless of the sales patter used to sell these
> systems to content providers and politicians.
>

I just want to chime in, in support of Greg's assessment here. I worked for
EFF for nine years, and I have done extensive work with ALA as well, and I
am absolutely certain that these organizations (and others, including
civil-liberties groups) will be extremely critical if any project adopts
ICRA labeling schemes. Moreover, Greg's characterization of the existing
systems as "primary censorship systems ... overwhelmingly used to subject
third parties, often adults, to restrictions against their will" is entirely
accurate.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

Florence writes:

Besides the fact Mike is using a language far too convoluted for many
> speakers on this list,


Ouch! If I do say something too convolutedly here, please send me a note,
and I'll rephrase accordingly.


> I would argue that one of the implications of the
> abusive deletions is that Jimbo is perceived as having "lost touch with
> base". I do not think letting someone speak on his behalf will help
> restore trust.
>

Just to be clear about this: Jimmy didn't ask me to speak for him, and I
haven't represented here that I'm speaking for him. I'm only offering my
personal (convoluted!) point of view, trying to be helpful.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Mike Godwin]

Tomek writes:

So... are we now going to start writting "USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm)" ?
> There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and
> vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars,
> articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of
> things to be deleted in order to make our projects more "family
> friendy".
>

For what it's worth, I personally don't see the issue as one of making
Commons (or Wikipedia or any other project) "family-friendly." There will
always be content that some substantial fraction of the reading population
will find offensive. This would be true even if the projects were limited to
text.

There's also no urgent legal issue driving any changes to Commons -- we
don't have reason to believe any category of content we knowingly carry on
Commons is definitionally illegal under U.S. law. (Obviously, when if people
upload content that is illegal, and we're informed about its presence, we'll
remove it -- most likely, volunteers will remove it even before it gets the
attention of the Foundation staff.)

If we judge Commons content simply on the basis of "Does this content serves
the mission of the projects?" there is no doubt that some content will
removed, some offensive content will not be removed, and Commons will no
longer be a kind of "dumping ground" for anything and everything regardless
of whether content lacks encyclopedic usefulness. As a side-effect of this,
you probably get both (a) a resource that is somewhat more "family friendly"
(because the sheer frequency of merely offensive images is reduced) and (b)
a resource that remains essentially "uncensored," consistent with its
encyclopedic mission.  (I use "uncensored" here to mean "not edited merely
to avoid offense.")


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 1:46 PM, Keegan Peterzell wrote:

> While there is much to be said about Jimbo's role from everyone, that's not
> Mike's point.  His is, and correct me if I'm wrong, Mike, "Sit down and work
> out the issue of the images, which is the most important, and then revisit
> social constructs".  Work first, then have a cup of coffee and talk.
>

You're not wrong. You've restated my views better than I stated them.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen  wrote:

> Mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley:
>
> "The policeman isn't there to create disorder;
> the policeman is there to preserve disorder."
>
>
> Sorry, couldn't resist. ;-D
>


I've always loved that quote. Me, I want neither to create disorder nor to
preserve disorder. It's not the nature of disorder to need creating or
preserving.

Creating and preserving order is a much harder challenge. Obviously,
creativity needs freedom and diversity, but it also needs rules. Striking
the right balance between freedom and rules is especially hard, but if the
recent debate leads people to reflecting on what a better balance is, that's
a good result, even if people remain (understandably) unhappy with certain
particular actions that gave rise to the debate.

I know a lot of people suppose that the attack from Fox is the trigger for
discussion of review of Commons policy, but in fact Commons policy has been
subject to ongoing review and discussion for some time now, as FloNight has
mentioned. Fox's maliciousness, and Jimmy's unilateral response to it, may
have added some urgency to the discussion, but I think the discussion needs
to happen.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:15 AM, MZMcBride  wrote:

>
>
> However, as someone who doesn't have a financial stake, as a non-Wikimedia
> Foundation employee, as an Internet libertarian, I don't see where you get
> off doing anything _but_ admonishing Jimmy's actions. His actions appear to
> be completely at odds with your past positions in this area.
>

When you are referring to my "past positions in this area," could you say
which works of mine you have read, and which passages you believe stand in
opposition to Jimmy's deleting content he believes are triggering attacks on
the projects?

I hope you'll understand my skepticism as to whether you have read CYBER
RIGHTS. I hardly know anyone who's read it.  ;)


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

Marc Riddell writes:


> Mike, please stop and listen. The Community, which is the heart and soul of
> this very Project, is ventilating, and making some extremely important
> points. Please stop trying to control, and re-direct, this dialogue in a
> more Foundation-comfortable direction. Listen and Learn.
>

Marc, I've been listening all along. Neither expression of disagreement nor
an effort to focus on constructive solutions entails the conclusion that
someone isn't listening.

Now, did you hear and learn from what I just said?

Best regards,


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

>
> > Wow. Even worse metaphor! "All the riches that are demanded"!
>
> Perhaps, but yours is no better. When you attack a village it is
> because you want something they have (riches, land, women) or you just
> want revenge for something. FOX don't want anything we have and they
> don't really dislike us (sure, they would rather people went to them
> for knowledge than us, but that isn't really what this is about). They
> are attacking us simply because it makes exciting news and makes them
> more money. That is a completely different motive to an attack on a
> village so a defence based on a metaphor of an attack on a village is
> bound to fail.
>

All metaphors are at least somewhat misleading, and some metaphors are
deeply misleading. But I'll do my best to avoid bad metaphors in the future
if Andre will join me in doing so.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Kim Bruning  wrote:

>
> Ah... I'm actually sort of good at this kind of thing, having mentioned
> aspects of it in oft-quoted "essay"s (such as [[:en:WP:BRD]].
> If people want, I could do a talk or workshop on that topic at
> Wikimania? This might reduce wikidrama all around. ;
>

I think this is a great idea. I fully support it.

>
> Oh well. If all you've got is lemons, it's time to make lemonade
> ;-)
>

This is a good attitude to have, and I support it too.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Andre Engels  wrote:

>
> Defending means lessening the chance of the opponent to succeed. If
> you throw all the riches that are demanded and then some over the city
> wall, that's not defending, that's capitulating.
>

Wow. Even worse metaphor! "All the riches that are demanded"!


> Not implicitly, no. But you were defending actions that in my eyes did
> just that, namely by deleting material apparently using the criterium
> "what might Fox object to?" rather than using the criterium "what does
> not in any way add to our mission of spreading knowledge?"
>

I'm not defending such a criterion, and I do not believe that such a
criterion informed Jimmy's actions. Jimmy can speak better than I can on
what he was thinking, but I'll note again that, to the extent you focus on
retrospectively criticizing Jimmy and not on what can be done positively to
improve Commons policy or its implementation, you are missing an
opportunity. Think future, not past. Think project, not Jimmy.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Andre Engels  wrote:

>
> So instead we just give in to them? We get attacked and decide to just
> sit up like a good dog?


No one is acting "like a good dog." Bad metaphor. When your village is
attacked and subject to future attacks, you build defenses. (Better
metaphor.) All defenses compromise your ability to do something besides
defend yourself -- that's the economics of biology. But we can't change the
way the world works by denying it.


> We dn't just say they're wrong, we join in to
> congratulate them.
>

I don't see anyone congratulating Fox except Fox and the usual folks aimed
at destroying us anway.

> I promise you, this would almost certainly not be an effective counter.
>
> Not towards Fox, but how about other news avenues?


I actually addressed this in my original posting.


> but to me, our own ideas and values ... should not be sacrificed to our
> popularity with a part of our audience.


I agree and posted nothing to the contrary.


> Even less should they be
> sacrificed in a way that is likely to be uneffective (you yourself
> said that Fox will present whatever we do as a proof of them being
> right and us being wrong).
>

See, you even recognize that I already said we won't win over Fox.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

> On 8 May 2010 16:48, Mike Godwin  wrote:Most of the
> debate has been
> about Jimmy, not about Commons policy on non-educational images.
>
>
So fix it.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:24 AM, MZMcBride  wrote:

>
> Most of the egregiously bad deletions were quickly overturned, and Jimmy
> was
> the one re-deleting the images. Now that he has agreed to stop, most of the
> poor deletions have been re-reversed. I doubt Jimmy approves; there's
> absolutely nothing in his actions over the past few days to suggest that he
> does.
>

I think you do Jimmy a disservice if you think he did not anticipate
precisely this result.


>  > To the extent that Jimmy's intervention has triggered a healthy debate
> about
> > policy, I think the powers he used, and the decisions -- not individually
> > but taken as a whole -- that he made are justified.
>
> Huh. I never thought I'd see the day that Mike Godwin would be supporting
> an
> attack on free speech and free ideas through censorship.


You're misunderstanding what I wrote here. The words "not individually" were
chosen for a reason.

Let me put it this way -- sometimes a police officer has to use physical
force to stop further violence from having. If you inferred from this
statement that that I favor police intervention as a first resort, or that I
favor physical force, you would properly be criticized as misrepresenting my
views.

Similarly, I don't favor "attacks on free speech" -- but like Nat Hentoff
and other free-speech theorists, I recognize that free speech depends on
active intervention and rule-making sometimes.  I know you are trying to be
provocative, but what you write here suggests that you don't actually
understand much of the nuance of free-speech principles.


> I don't say
> "censorship," lightly: Jimmy deliberately deleted historical pieces of art
> and illustrations in his rampage. And you think this is a good thing?
>

No.

Mike, it looks like you've compromised your ideals in favor of toeing the
> party line, and for that, I'm pretty disappointed.
>

It is inconceivable to me that you have ever not been disappointed in me.
I'm familiar with your other writings, after all. It is your nature to be
disappointed.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:11 AM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:

>
> On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, Mike Godwin wrote:
> > I disagree with the suggestion that it would have been better for Fox to
> > have gone with the original story they were trying to create rather than
> > with the story Jimmy in effect created for them.
>
> I assume that's a reply to my saying that Fox is likely to use the mass
> deletions as proof of a guilty mind, yes? I'd be really interested in
> having you expand on this.
>

It wasn't a response -- I hadn't read your comment yet.  But when I did see
your comment, I thought it missed the point that Fox was always going to
congratulate itself on its story, regardless of what we did or didn't do in
response. I've been dealing with media strategy, both as a reporter and as
someone who has to respond to media, for nearly three decades now. The issue
isn't whether you can persuade Fox of anything -- Fox is not the kind of
organization you can have a discussion with.


> Perhaps I simply misunderstand how irresponsible and influential Fox
> news is, but I would have thought that being able to show that the
> images aren't illegal while also showing that we're having a reasoned
> discussion about whether we want the legal ones or not would have been
> an effective counter to the negative PR Fox is creating.


I promise you, this would almost certainly not be an effective counter.

If we believe, as Sue does, that this protection against outside
> influence is a good thing, then Jimbo is a weak link so long as he can
> enact the changes some outsider wants of his own accord.


I believe you misunderstand both what Jimmy was trying to do, and what the
consequences of it are.  I could elaborate on this, and will be happy to do
so privately, but as I said, I think focusing on Jimmy means missing an
opportunity to do something constructive.


--Mike
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[Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

I want to write personally -- not speaking on behalf of the Foundation but
instead as a longtime participant in online communities who has worked
extensively on free-speech issues -- to offer my perspective on a couple of
themes that I've seen made in threads here. The first is the claim that
Jimmy's actions represent a collapse in the face of a threat by Fox News
(and that this threat was somehow small or insignificant). The second is the
idea that the proper focus of the current discussion ought to be focused on
Jimmy (and anger against Jimmy's taking action, or against particular
aspects of the actions he took) to the effective exclusion of discussion of
whether Wikimedia Commons policy should be revisited, refined, or better
implemented.

First, my belief as a former journalist is that Fox News is not a
responsible news organization. This means that they get too many stories
wrong in the first place (as when they uncritically echo Larry Sanger's
uninformed and self-interested assertions), and it also means that when
their mistakes are brought to their attention, they may redouble their
aggressive attacks in the hope of somehow vindicating their original story.
This I believe is what Fox News (or at least its reporter and her editors)
were trying to do. If the media culture in the United States were such that
Fox News had no influence outside itself, we could probably just ignore it.
But the reality is that the virulent culture of Fox News does manage to
infect other media coverage in ways that are destructive to good people and
to good projects.

I disagree with the suggestion that it would have been better for Fox to
have gone with the original story they were trying to create rather than
with the story Jimmy in effect created for them.  Jimmy's decision to
intervene changed the narrative they were attempting to create. So even if
you disagree with some or all of the particulars of Jimmy's actions, you may
still be able to see how Jimmy's actions, taken as a whole, created
breathing space for discussion of an issue on Commons that even many of
Jimmy's critics believe is a real issue.

The question then becomes whether we're doing to discuss the issues of
Commons policy or discuss whether Jimmy's actions themselves signify a
problem that needs to be fixed.  You may say we can discuss both, and
technically you'd be right, but the reality of human discourse is that if
you spend your time venting at Jimmy, you won't be discussing Commons
policy, and you'll be diverting attention from Commons policy. My personal
opinion is that this would be the waste of an opportunity.

I think it's also worth remembering that when an individual like Jimmy is
given extraordinary cross-project powers to use in extraordinary
circumstances, this more or less guarantees that any use of those powers
will be controversial. (If they were uncontroversial, nobody would need
them, since consensus processes would fix all problems quickly and
effectively.) But rather than focus on whether your disagreement with the
particulars of what Jimmy did means that Jimmy's powers should be removed,
you should choose instead, I believe, to use this abrupt intervention as an
opportunity to discuss whether Commons policy and its implementation can be
improved in a way that brings it more into line with the Wikimedia projects'
mission. Once this discussion happens, it would not surprise me if the
result turned out to be that some of the material deleted by Jimmy will be
restored by the community -- probably with Jimmy's approval in many cases.

To the extent that Jimmy's intervention has triggered a healthy debate about
policy, I think the powers he used, and the decisions -- not individually
but taken as a whole -- that he made are justified. (Like many of you, I
would probably disagree with some of his particular decisions, but I
recognize that I'd be critical of anyone's particular decisions.) It is not
the case, after all, that Jimmy routinely intervenes in projects these days
-- it is mostly the case that he forbears from intervening, which is as it
should be, and which I think speaks well of his restraint.  It should be
kept in mind, I think, that Jimmy's intervention was aimed at protecting our
projects from external threat and coercion, precisely to give breathing
space to the kind of dialog and consensus processes that we all value and
believe to be core principles of Wikimedia projects. I hope that rather than
venting and raging about what was done in the face of an imminent and
vicious threat gives way to some forward-looking discussion of how things
can be made better. This discussion is best focused on policy, and not on
Jimmy, in my view, since Jimmy's actions represent efforts to protect the
Wikimedia projects and movement. That's where our efforts should be focused
too.



--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Status report on logo copyright issues at Swedish Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Anthony  wrote:

>
> Finally, I'd like to quote something that you said and make a comment:  "My
> experience has been that those who object to this haven't given adequate
> attention to the GFDL and Creative Commons licenses we operate under --
> neither license is "free,""
>
> Umm, WTF?  The GFDL and CC licenses aren't free?  What's that whole thing
> about Wikipedia being "the free encyclopedia", then?  Did I misunderstand
> the context in which you said that or did you misspeak or something?
>

What I mean is that "free" in the context of "free licensing" doesn't
precisely mean "free as in free speech" any more than it means "free as in
free beer." Whether you're talking GFDL or CC-BY-SA or any other "free
license," you're talking imposing downstream obligations on re-users that
are more onerous than those imposed on (for example) re-users of public
domain works.

Properly understood, we know exactly why we're imposing these downstream
obligations, and we believe that doing so supports a larger sense of
"freedom," but we must remember that free licenses are themselves tools
designed to invoke rights in copyright and impose obligations relating to
rights in copyright, even as they also provide rights to re-users.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Status report on logo copyright issues at Swedish Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

Dear folks,

I was attending a meeting of the Northern California Copyright Society
today, and I mentioned to a colleague the discussions we have had on this
list and elsewhere regarding whether the Wikimedia logos, which are
trademarked, should be freely licensed as copyrighted works.  My colleague
immediately said this: "Do they realize that if you freely license the
trademarked logo, that may be interpreted by a court in trademark litigation
as abandonment of the trademark?"

Me:  "Well, I've tried to suggest this, but perhaps I haven't said it
clearly enough. There's a tendency for some non-lawyers to assume that
trademark issues are wholly and necessarily separate from copyright issues."

Colleague: "Well, you'd better tell them that freely licensing the logos
might undermine your ability to defend your trademarks in them."

And so, here I am, telling you just that.


Best regards,


--Mike
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[Foundation-l] Status report on logo copyright issues at Swedish Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

David Castor writes:

The use of these logos are thus the only thing standing in the way of
> stating that all material from Swedish Wikipedia can be freely reused,
> without any further permission.


Is there any obvious legal problem with stating that (for example) "All
material from Swedish Wikipedia may be freely reused, without further
permission, with the exception of the Wikimedia trademarks and copyrighted
logos, for which separate, specific permission for reuse must be sought"?

Yes, that is a longer sentence. But in my experience the kinds of people who
agonize over copyright permissions are uniformly capable of parsing longer
sentences.

Note that my suggestion handily dodges the need to instruct anyone about
whether the Wikipedia image in the corner of the page is freely licensed for
reuse. It also avoids the need to explain to someone what constitutes part
of the user interface and what doesn't.  It also doesn't require a
non-law-trained user to parse issues of trademark versus copyright. So in
fact it is a simpler, user-friendlier solution that seems consistent with
David's statement of what Swedish Wikipedians want to be able to do.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

WJhonson writes:


> I'm going to disagree with this claim.  Are you suggesting that in order to
> write an article about a living person, a reporter would need their license
> to do so?


Not at all. I'm pointing out, though, that there are all sorts of potential
and actual rights embedded in content, and that the right of publicity (as
it's called in the United States) is one of them. If we insisted on a
simplistic notion of "freedom" with regard to free content, we'd have to
take this legal encumbrance into account.

By submitting, using their true names, they are granting us the license to
> use their true names per our terms.
>

Which free license is being used here with regard to the right to use true
names? GFDL? CC-BY-SA?

>
> How could we interpret any of that differently?  It seems like a
> hodge-podge.
>

Now you're beginning to see the complexity of the issues.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 6:58 PM, John Vandenberg  wrote:

>
> The purpose of defining "free" is to ensure that there will be no
> problem *for unknown reuse scenarios in the future*, _and_ to prevent
> a proliferation of individually crafted licenses for each case.
>

Thank you for recognizing that there are no *known* scenarios in which the
current use of Wikimedia-owned images would be a problem. I can't imagine
any either.

I also can't see any scenarios that lead to "a proliferation of individually
crafted licenses for each case." This seems to be a phantom hazard.

I haven't looked at the license in detail, but I take it for granted
> that you have crafted it clearly define the reuse possibilities.
> However the WMF logos are available under a license that only covers
> the WMF logos, and isn't compatible with the prevailing definitions of
> "free".
>

I'm pleased that you recognize that the problem is one with how you use
words like "compatible" and "free."  The problem is that you are applying
imprecise notions of "compatible" and "free" that, in your mind, hint at
something awful (dogs and cats living together?) without actually posing the
risk of something awful.

> I keep pointing out, of course, that there's lots of material in Swedish
> > Wikipedia that's not freely licensed -- for example, the names of Living
> > Persons or the true names of contributors who choose to share them.
>
> Those are not copyright - there are different laws which protect them
> in various ways.
>

Of course it's not copyright. But the word "free" is not defined solely by
copyright law, is it?


> The WMF logos (marks) are protected by copyright.
>

They're protected by other areas of law too.

I realize that a non-practitioner may suppose that different areas of
intellectual-property law can and must be considered in analytical isolation
from one another, but in the real world, as you may imagine, different areas
of law intersect and interact all the time.


> The Sv.Wp decision is removing the inconsistency in its copyright
> stance by removing the loop hole for WMF logos.  Overly simplistic?
> Maybe.  However lots of foreign language projects have adopted very
> strict positions on copyright issues.
>

Well, by all means, then, if some foreign language projects have adopted
overly simplistic positions, we will increase the world's source of free
knowledge by following their example, right?


> Christophe Henner suggested earlier in this thread that Swedish
> Wikipedia is just ahead of the curve.  I agree.  Sooner or later a
> Wikipedia is going to try to be turned into a Debian package!  I'd bet
> on Debian legal requiring that the WMF logos are stripped, even if
> they are used in compliance with the WMF policy.
>

So what? We don't require that the WMF logos be used in some future Debian
package, nor is it likely we will, absent a formal partnership of some sort
(which seems unlikely).


>
> Re-iterating the relationship between project and the host (WMF)
> doesn't help, as strong stances on rejecting non-free elements
> (copyright & trademark) are usually made to protect the right to fork,
> etc.
>

I wasn't reiterating a relationship. I was reiterating the fact that the
uses in question are clearly and completely and nonrestrictively allowed by
the copyright holder.


>
> I would prefer that Sv.Wp make an exception for WMF logos being used
> in conjunction with interwiki links, such as on
> sv:template:wikisource.  To me, those uses are part of the UI of the
> project, and fall under fair use of the trademark.
>

That seems like an eminently rational approach -- far more "understandable"
as I use that word.

>
> However, I've seen this non-free logo debate too many times to be
> surprised that there are lots of people willing to make a tough stance
> on it.
>

I have seen it for a quarter century.  I don't think we serve freedom by
reducing our understanding of free culture to the lowest-common-denominator,
most simplistic, most un-nuanced, most legally unsophisticated notions of
freedom.  That is fanaticism for its own sake, and not at all a service to
free culture.


--Mike
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[Foundation-l] Logo Copyright

[Mike Godwin]

Klaus Graf writes:

Nobody can be in doubt that the Volvo Logo isn't copyrighted at least
> in the US.


Of course they can. Plenty of letterform-based designs are copyrighted in
the United States.


> If attorneys are confusing trademark and copyright
> protection Wikimedia counsel should not imitate them.


I'm not imitating anyone, but thanks.


> Would you PLEASE
> read
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
>

I hope you will understand why I choose not to ignore my understanding of
copyright law and defer instead to a Wikipedia article, no matter how
well-intentioned it is, and no matter how highly I respect Wikipedia as a
general-knowledge resource.  Wikipedia is not an authority on what copyright
is, or on what is copyrightable.

>
> Thank you.
>

Oh, no, thank *you*.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:55 PM, John Vandenberg  wrote:

>
> The Swedish Wikipedia has drawn a line in the sand that all content in
> article space should meet the definition of "free
> content".[http://freedomdefined.org/]


I agree that they've been drawing a line in the sand, all right.


>  The reason for using this
> criteria is so that there is not a need to consult a different license
> for each logo in order to determine what uses are acceptable.
>

The issue, though, is that there's no specific problem at all associated
with the appearances of the Wikimedia copyrighted and trademarked logos in
the contexts in which they are used.  *In other words, all this attention
has been focused on a problem that has never occurred with regard to the
images in question.*

I keep pointing out, of course, that there's lots of material in Swedish
Wikipedia that's not freely licensed -- for example, the names of Living
Persons or the true names of contributors who choose to share them.

What seems to me to be happening here is a kind of nervous insistence on a
very simplistic kind of ideological consistency, which, if it were followed
further along this extreme, would threaten to make Wikipedia unusable.
Consider for example the famous quotation mentioned here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance .


The availability of a WMF license for their logos is useful for some
> purposes, however the Wikimedia logos do not meet the criteria of free
> content.


And therefore if the Wikimedia logos are used with permission on
Wikimedia-hosted projects, the earth will crack open, and dogs and cats will
start living together openly.


>  If Wp.Sv doesn't want to accept non-free licenses in article
> space, then it is understandable that the WMF logos need to go as
> well.
>

This is perhaps too broad a use of the word "understandable" than I am used
to.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:31 PM, John Vandenberg  wrote:

>
> In your earlier comment, which you have now snipped, you asserted that
> Sv.Wp was doing the wrong thing:
>
> "I hope no one thinks Swedish Wikipedians (or anyone else) is free to
> reuse the Volvo logo
> without a license."
>

Not quite. I think Sv.Wp is doing the right thing but with the wrong
justification.  And I was trying to say I don't think downstream re-users
should infer the appearance of the Volvo logo on Sv.Wp that they have the
right to reuse it as a public-domain image.

Do you now accept that it is quite possible that this logo could be
> appropriately tagged as PD and its use in Sv.Wp articles is congruent
> with their position about the removal of non-free WMF logos from
> articles?
>

I wouldn't say "quite possible," no.  I suspect Volvo's IP attorneys have a
different opinion about whether the Volvo logo is public-domain than perhaps
you do.

As I see the energy poured into the question of whether the Wikipedia should
use copyrighted and trademarked logos (which they are already licensed to
use!), I cannot help but agree with the sentiment expressed earlier that the
Swedish Wikipedians have come up with a solution in search of a problem.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:03 PM, John Vandenberg  wrote:

>
>
> Are you saying that the PD tag on this page is incorrect?
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Volvo_logo.svg
>

Oh, I'm saying something much more lawyerly than that -- I'm saying I don't
know whether Volvo would accept the declaration that the logo is not
protected by copyright.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

(Resent with correct subject header)

John Vandenberg writes:


> By the way, check out . ?I hope no one
> > thinks Swedish Wikipedians (or anyone else) is free to reuse the Volvo
> logo
> > without a license.
>
> That image is in the PD as it does not meet the threshold of
> originality.  Why do they do not need a license?
>
>
Are you saying that Volvo takes the position that the Volvo logo "does not
meet the threshold of originality" and therefore is not copyrightable?  Can
you cite a source on this?



--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 72, Issue 63

[Mike Godwin]

John Vandenberg writes:


> By the way, check out . ?I hope no one
> > thinks Swedish Wikipedians (or anyone else) is free to reuse the Volvo
> logo
> > without a license.
>
> That image is in the PD as it does not meet the threshold of
> originality.  Why do they do not need a license?
>
>
Are you saying that Volvo takes the position that the Volvo logo "does not
meet the threshold of originality" and therefore is not copyrightable?  Can
you cite a source on this?



--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 12:42 AM, Andre Engels wrote:

>
> > This is exactly right.  If we had no copyright or trademark restrictions
> on
> > the Wikimedia logos and marks, it would be trivial for proprietary
> vendors
> > to use the unrestricted logos in association with unfree content.
>
> But how about with trademark and without copyright restrictions?
>

Why do you think trademark restrictions are okay but copyright restrictions
aren't?

If you are against copyright restrictions, why don't you favor releasing all
Wikimedia content into the public domain rather than using CC-BY-SA and
GFDL?


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

The Cunctator writes:


> No, this is a profoundly stupid decision that has no logical sense. A
> "free"
> license is a copyright license.
>

The point bears repeating (over and over again, if necessary).  The free
licenses we use are in fact quite demanding with regard to downstream uses.
And our purpose in protecting the Wikimedia trademarks is partly to make
sure that downstream reusers stick to the free licenses under which we
distribute free content.

By the way, check out .  I hope no one
thinks Swedish Wikipedians (or anyone else) is free to reuse the Volvo logo
without a license.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Marcus Buck  wrote:

> Mike Godwin hett schreven:
>
>  My guess, admittedly based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, is that the
>> Swedish Wikipedians who created this largely artificial and unnecessary
>> dispute have not consulted independent trademark and copyright experts
>> with
>> regard to the rationale for their decision.
>>
>>
> Might be true, I don't know. You are an expert, so share your knowledge.
> What's the difference between e.g. Coca Cola with it's PD-old logo and
> Wikimedia? Why do we need copyright restrictions to protect our projects
> when Coca Cola (or any other company/organization with non-copyrighted logo)
> does not?
>

This is explained in the policy document I posted a link for.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

Thanks, MZ!

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 5:28 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:

> Mike Godwin wrote:
> > Darn it! A waste, I say! And I worked so hard to give you
> > <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy>.
>
> Huh, neat. I'm not sure there was an announcement about that, but it's nice
> to know it's there!
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

masti writes:

It's crazy. sv.wiki still has "unfree" logo on every page :)
> It is "unfree" to protect wiki identity.
>

This is exactly right.  If we had no copyright or trademark restrictions on
the Wikimedia logos and marks, it would be trivial for proprietary vendors
to use the unrestricted logos in association with unfree content.

My experience has been that those who object to this haven't given adequate
attention to the GFDL and Creative Commons licenses we operate under --
neither license is "free," and each imposes restrictions and obligations on
reusers of content.  What we're doing with the Wikimedia trademarks is
designed to reinforce this insistence on the freedom of the content we are
disseminating.

My guess, admittedly based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, is that the
Swedish Wikipedians who created this largely artificial and unnecessary
dispute have not consulted independent trademark and copyright experts with
regard to the rationale for their decision.

Robert Rohde writes:

Personally, I also feel that it sets a bad example for a free content
> company like WMF not to have any formal policy on the third party use
> of their logos.  Even within Wikimedia there is no agreement about
> what is allowed and what isn't, except that Mike and others have
> generally said they don't object to most uses by the community, even
> while reserving full copyright control and the right to object in the
> future.
>

I feel as if the many months of work I put into developing a new, clearer,
liberal trademark policy for WMF has gone to waste!

>
> It has been three or four years since I first asked members of the WMF
> to draft a policy on logo use that would be clear about what is
> allowed both in the community and for reusers.


And now I really, really feel it was wasted!

Given that we don't have clear policies regarding logo use, I think
> the Swedish Wikipedia decision is entirely defensible.


Darn it! A waste, I say! And I worked so hard to give you
.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Is "Wiktionary" copyright?

[Mike Godwin]

We've trademarked the word mark "Wiktionary" in a number of jurisdictions,
including the United States. I think most trademark lawyers would view
"wikitionary" as confusingly similar -- I will probably follow up with our
outside trademark counsel.


--Mike


On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 3:48 PM, effe iets anders
wrote:

> I assume you are referring to the term trademarked rather than copyrighted.
> I suggest you contact Mike Godwin directly with this kind of questions, he
> is handling those.
>
> With kind regards,
>
> Lodewijk
>
> 2010/3/29 Andrew Turvey 
>
> Is the term "Wiktionary" copyrighted? I only ask because the OpenDemocracy
>> website has recently started a "Dictionary of Ethical Politics
>> "wikitionary""
>>
>> http://resurgence.opendemocracy.net/index.php/Main_Page
>>
>> If it is copyrighted, you may want to say something to them, or else it
>> will end up like the "hoover" - a generic term usable by anyone.
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>>
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy

[Mike Godwin]

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen writes:

It should be noted that the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse - which
> is the closest thing to a accessible public record of such notices - does
> not appear to hold more than 3 (count them, three) notices that
> deal with content on wikimedia sites. Notably it appears that none
> of them appears to have been entered by the WMF - with the caveat
> that perhaps the one involving German Wikipedia may have had some
> chapter involvement, though likely not.
>
> I would be interested to hear from some knowledgeable person in a
> position of responsibility within the Foundation (perhaps Mike
> Godwin), whether routine reporting of these kind of notices to
> Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has been explored in any depth.
>

Two of the three notices you refer to here were forwarded to
ChillingEffects.org by me. The one dated 2004 obviously isn't from me (I
began work at WMF in 2007). There was no chapter involvement in my decision
to forward the two notices in question to ChillingEffects.org.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 72, Issue 21

[Mike Godwin]

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen writes:

It should be noted that the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse - which
> is the closest thing to a accessible public record of such notices - does
> not appear to hold more than 3 (count them, three) notices that
> deal with content on wikimedia sites. Notably it appears that none
> of them appears to have been entered by the WMF - with the caveat
> that perhaps the one involving German Wikipedia may have had some
> chapter involvement, though likely not.
>
> I would be interested to hear from some knowledgeable person in a
> position of responsibility within the Foundation (perhaps Mike
> Godwin), whether routine reporting of these kind of notices to
> Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has been explored in any depth.
>

Two of the three notices you refer to here were forwarded to
ChillingEffects.org by me. The one dated 2004 obviously isn't from me (I
began work at WMF in 2007). There was no chapter involvement in my decision
to forward the two notices in question to ChillingEffects.org.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] At school

[Mike Godwin]

Some folks at Wikipedia criticize the heck out of schools and don't trust
schools because schools let anyone in, including people who don't want to
learn.  If schools tolerate people who don't learn, why do they exist? There
could be a billion disruptive students.  And when the old ones graduate,
there are always new ones.


> Kids at my school are criticizing the heck out of your Foundation and will
> not trust Wikipedia because anyone can edit it.  If anyone can edit, then
> why do you exist? There could be a billion vandals.  When the old ones get
> banned, there could be new ones.
>
>

--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] video presentation on explicit images on WMF projects

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 8:31 PM, private musings wrote:

>
> I just had a good chat with someone pointing out that my posts probably
> conflate a few different areas, so perhaps while I may have your ear, Mike,
> I could ask you if you'd see any problem with expanding the role of OTRS to
> include managing assertions of model age and release related to explicit
> media - perhaps we could agree that might be a good thing? :-)
>

I do not believe it is a good idea to expand duties of OTRS beyond those
required by law. I do not believe OTRS is currently required by law to
manage assertions of model age and release.  I do not believe OTRS could
scale to assume such duties. I do believe that attempting to get the
Foundation to impose top-down intervention in this case when you can't
persuade the community itself of your concerns about explicit media is a bad
thing.


--Mike
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