Slashdot Mirror
Wikimedia Foundation Nabs $3 Million Grant To Improve Accessibility of Free Commons' Content (venturebeat.com)
As with other Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimedia Commons (a repository of free-to-use media assets, including photos, audio clips, and videos) is funded through donations, and the organization has now received $3 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic body set up in 1934 by the former president and CEO of General Motors. From a report on VentureBeat: With $3 million in the coffers, the Wikimedia Foundation says it will embark on a three-year mission to link assets on Wikimedia Commons with Wikidata, the organization's crowdsourced knowledge base. The upshot of this endeavor will mean that photos, videos, and all the rest will be much easier to find and, crucially, it will be "machine-readable" which opens up a wealth of opportunities to automate the process of integrating content into third-party services, such as apps and services operated by museums, galleries, and libraries. On the flip-side, this will also make it easier for third-party bodies to donate content to Wikimedia Commons while automatically including existing metadata, bypassing the need to manually label media.
If they would simply the crappy CC licenses....then more people would be able to use their content.
The alternative is returning to the old method of finding a contact for the content which normally involves a whois lookup and several phone calls, then hoping the entity is big enough to have licence terms drafted.
Having licenses named things like BY-NC-ND means you simply cannot use the content without doing research.
Ten seconds at Creative Commons Licences should be adequate research
Even then, it can still be impossible to use content because of morass of words in the mess that Lessig made the decision to create instead of just making something simple.
Morass of words!? CreativeCommons' most complicated licence weighs in at 87 lines. Microsoft's most basic licence for Win 10 Retail weighs in at 191 lines and only covers one product
We had to stop distributing CC learning materials since our lawyers couldn't guarantee that we wouldn't get sued since BY-SA isn't clear on what in the hell it requires.
Firstly, no lawyer, ever, can guarantee you won't get sued - regardless of which licencing scheme you are using. Secondly, if your lawyers can't decipher a BY-SA, then you need better lawyers. Thirdly, if it was true that the CC licence was an unreasonable risk, you knew who the creator was (BY) and could have simply contacted them for clarification or an alternative licence - as your lawyers should have.
Overall, you appear to be attempting a FUD campaign (or are a giant pansy). I publish and redistribute plenty of CC works without much difficulty in the interpretation of, or fear of, the associated words or pictures.
[Rent This Space]