Wikipedia a Sell Out?

05-07-2008 | 05:44 PM EST

News came recently that a major German publisher plans to lift articles directly from Wikipedia to be included in a commercial book that will be printed and sold later this year. Because Wikipedia's articles are written and edited free-of-charge by volunteers throughout the world, the move has some crying foul. A cacophony of voices from around the Internet has already begun questioning whether the original content contributors won't be due some royalties and whether this act is legal. Some blogs have even received comments calling for a boycott on Wikipedia. Will this be the beginning of the end of Wikipedia as we know it?

The outcry began when German publisher, Bertelsmann, said it plans to print a book called "The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia." Bertelsmann's Encyclopedia will include a verbatim printing of some of the year's most popular Wikipedia articles. Hitting bookstores in September, the Encyclopedia will cost 19.95 euros (currently around $32 U.S.) of which Bertelsmann will pay the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., (a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity) one euro for every copy sold. And the writers, editors, and others whose words and work will be used directly? They won't get paid a cent. So, how can this be? Has the Wikimedia Foundation suddenly turned into yet another money hungry organization bent on, as Mark O'Neill of Now Sourcing puts it, "shafting" the contributors?

I've run across this scenario a lot lately, and I've actually been frequently addressing it offline. To me, the problem is that copyleft is suffering from its own popularity.

Under a section of the Wikipedia license titled, "2. VERBATIM COPYING," it reads:

You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially (emphasis, mine), provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.

You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.

In other words, Bertelsmann's book is perfectly legal under the terms of the license.

I jokingly commented in a recent post about Bill Gate's apparent misunderstanding of the "free" concept that lies at the heart of the various GNU licenses, but the reality is, a lot of people really don't seem to understand that the "free" has to do with freedom and not monetary cost. I think that this confusion led to fewer problems in the past, because there just wasn't the same mainstream popularity of ideologically free resources that we have today. It seems to me that people in the general public are now not only more aware of free and open source software and free culture in general, but they're also more willing than ever to contribute to it — often, apparently, without really understanding what their contribution means.

So, I think that the people who are upset with Wikimedia about this have at least a few choices at this point. 1. Accept that no laws were broken and that the spirit of GNU Free Documentation License was upheld and then continue contributing to and using Wikipedia as always. 2. Publish and sell their own compilation of their contributions to Wikipedia. 3. Create a whole new "free-ish" license of their own along with a new repository of human knowledge that promises to never monetize the knowledge without financially compensating the contributors. (Or just support only those works licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license.)

Regardless of how things end for Wikimedia, I predict we're going to see a lot more of this as the desire to share and contribute freely to culture grows in popularity. Those of us who understand and support the intent of things like the GNU licenses and some of the Creative Commons licenses will just have to make sure we're doing our part to educate the general public on what exactly they're getting themselves into.

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