Wikipedia Goes Commercial

Well, it is legal and I find your title unfair in the present case.

“The pur­pose of this License is to make a man­u­al, text­book, or oth­er func­tion­al and use­ful doc­u­ment “free” in the sense of free­dom: to assure every­one the effec­tive free­dom to copy and redis­trib­ute it, with or with­out mod­i­fy­ing it, either com­mer­cial­ly or non­com­mer­cial­ly.”
source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Open Source and Free Soft­ware (GPL,…) and Copy­left con­tents does­n’t for­bid com­mer­cial use, in the con­trary it encour­ages it (If it was­n’t the case mag­a­zines for exam­ple could­n’t redis­trib­ute Free Soft­ware). The eco­nom­i­cal mod­els around Free Software/ Copy­left con­tents are not based on the con­tent them­selves (which are always Free) but on even­tu­al ser­vices for them (IBM, HP…). So Ber­tels­mann won’t real­ly sell con­tent as such, it will just sell a *ser­vice* (a book, writ­ten on paper, more com­fort­able than a com­put­er screen and can be used with­out a com­put­er every­where) and peo­ple can freely decide to buy this *ser­vice* or not if they find any need for it.

“”” It can then mon­e­tize that con­tent, keep most of the prof­its (a publisher’s dream) “””

Copy­left con­tent is not a publisher’s dream, there’s a very impor­tant dif­fer­ence, it’s called com­pe­ti­tion.

In the real pub­lish­er world the pub­lish­er (gen­er­al­ly) have the mono­pole of the price of the book for 90 years. There is no pos­si­ble com­pe­ti­tion because the pub­lish­er gen­er­al­ly owns the pub­lish­ing rights.
That’s why non-pub­lic domain books are so expan­sive, there’s no com­pe­ti­tion pos­si­ble on price: you take it or you leave it.

In the case of the Wikipedia (a copy­left licence), *any* pub­lish­er or asso­ci­a­tion or indi­vid­ual or church or (put your name here) can pub­lish a bet­ter price/service if he wants. So mak­ing a huge/unfair prof­it is just impos­si­ble because com­pe­ti­tion lev­els the play­ground.

So I cer­tain­ly think we can reproach a lot of things to the Wiki­me­dia foun­da­tion (and the Wikipedia itself) but not to live by its stan­dard and copy­left license which is there since the begin­ning.

So for my part I’m pleased Ber­tels­mann is pub­lish­ing this book and I hope there will be many oth­er publishers/associations going for it to low­er the price and give access to real books based on Wikipedia to a max­i­mum of peo­ple.

fran­cois

PS: thanks for Open­Cul­ture (great site that I real­ly appre­ci­ate)

I agree — unseem­ly with sev­er­al under­lines. I’m also try­ing to imag­ine who would want such a thing as a print­ed, abridged Wikipedia. The whole appeal of Wikipedia is its real-time updat­ing by a com­mu­ni­ty of learn­ers. If you’re going to freeze an ency­clo­pe­dia in amber, then it real­ly should have a whole edi­to­r­i­al board, etc.

I also think your fram­ing of this is a bit unfair. Wikipedia makes clear that it is not to be thought of as a place for orig­i­nal research, but rather a col­lec­tive effort on the parts of many vol­un­teers to bring infor­ma­tion from oth­er sources togeth­er in one place for free use. From my lim­it­ed expe­ri­ence with observ­ing the Wikipedia com­mu­ni­ty, I would expect that they would be hap­py at this news as it fur­thers the aims of the Wikipedia project and makes the foun­da­tion some mon­ey, as for now they rely almost entire­ly (i believe) on dona­tions.

I see where the moral­ly shad­ow area is but as far as I’m con­cerned we’re writ­ing ency­clo­pe­dia there, to make knowl­edge acces­si­ble and our world account­able. If there are peo­ple who will pre­fer book over going online to look things up on de.wikipedia for free then it fur­thers the reach of our cause. Linked arti­cled sug­gests hat Wikipedia is rip­ping of it’s mem­bers. How exact­ly are they doing it? Foun­da­tion can’t pos­si­bly stop the pub­li­ca­tion and they won’t be build­ing pri­vate estates from the share they get back – it will be used to run Wikipedia which is becom­ing increas­ing­ly expen­sive busi­ness.