Talk:Projects/Archives2/Queen's printer media

Comparison of usage policies

After reviewing the usage policies of the various jurisdictions some observations can be made.

There is a trend toward deprecating royal terminology such as "Queen's printer," or "Crown Copyright."
Three areas of concern regularly appear for the use of government material:
1. No commercial usage,
2. Accuracy of reproduction, and
3. Attribution.
Some require an acknowledgement that what is used in not represented as official.

The biggest difference between this and existing Wikimedia projects is over commercial usage; non-derivative licences can also be problematical. Allowing these is contrary to the Free culture principle that downstream users should have complete freedom to use the material in whatever way they desire. There is a significant point of principle here that we will need to address. Some people who like Creative Commons licences, are not yet ready to accept commercial uses or changes to their creations; they may change their views later. Allowing these more restrictive licences now could pay off over time. Eclecticology 20:35, 27 March 2011 (EDT)

I guess the thing is that in the USA government work is in the public domain. Thus if the CDC makes a nice graft about some disease we can cut and paste it and use it on Wikipedia. Wikipedia therefore covers American topic much better than Canadian ones. Other countries then complain about this fact. One solution would be for Health Canada to release there content under a license we can use. One that note I think I will try approaching them... --Doc James 15:35, 28 March 2011 (EDT)

If other countries made things more available their citizens wouldn't need to depend on information from American sources. (LOL) How distinct is Canadian medical literature from that of the US? It could make a bigger difference in areas like geology. Eclecticology 22:57, 28 March 2011 (EDT)

I don't know about the differences in medical literature between Canada and the US, but I sometimes find the differences in medical articles in the German vs English wikipedia thought provoking. Doc James - I am keen to hear how the discussions with Health Canada go! Tenbergen 23:16, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

My letter to Crown Copyright

Dear Crown Copyright

We at Wikimedia Canada are working to improve access to information in the public domain, specifically through the projects Wikipedia.org (the free online encyclopedia).

Wikipedia is under a creative commons 3.0 license which allows commercial reuse with attribution. Health Canada however does not allow commercial use in contrast to the US government materials. Do to ease of use of NIH/CDC materials coverage of United States topics are often more in-depth on Wikipedia than Canadian topics.

Wikipedia is currently the 5th most popular website in the world. The medical content alone gets 200 million page views a month. As a physician I feel it is important to give both Canadian and global citizens the best possible access to health information that we can. Thus wondering about the possibility of getting some Health Canada information released under a license suitable for use on Wikipedia?

Many thanks for your time in this matter

James Heilman

MD, CCFP(EM), Wikipedian

President Wikimedia Canada

Will let you know of the response.--Doc James 11:48, 9 May 2011 (EDT)

Interesting choice of addressee. Eclecticology 12:59, 9 May 2011 (EDT)

Great, this campaign is important to me. I think that we should also send a letter to the owner of the Parliament copyright; I'd like to be able to illustrate articles about MPs with their official photos rather than blurry images taken from the back of crowds. As tertiary priorities, we could also send letters to Parks Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Canadian Forces. I'd do it myself, but I think only the President can write letters on behalf of our organization. Maybe I'll draft some of those letters in case you feel like sending them later. Jeffery Nichols (Arctic.gnome) (talk)

No we can all send them. It might be best to have multiple signature. I will let you know if I hear anything back. My hopes are not that high though. This is why Wikipedia is so controversial. A clash between the establishment who believes strongly in intellectual property rights verses a small fringe (which I hope is growing) who believes in the public domain. BTW these might work better on official looking stationary with the Wikimedia logo :-) --Doc James 01:34, 10 May 2011 (EDT)

I don't think that limiting ourselves to presidential letters would be very productive. We should be encouraging everyone to do this according to whatever department has material that interests them. It's more important as a group to approach the problem strategically based on an understanding of why governments retain copyrights in the first place. Are there any statistics about just how much revenue governments, particularly the federal government, receives from copyright royalties? I suspect very little. That would be contrary to the purpose of copyright as an economic right. Eclecticology 06:26, 10 May 2011 (EDT)

I've had this discussion with Library and Archives Canada on their Flickr feed. They were using a CC-by license, but it was changed last summer to the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) as they felt it was the one most compatible with the Crown Copyright...

This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nitrate_Film_Preservation_Facility_Canada.jpg went to this http://www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac/5860612143/sizes/o/in/photostream/ Notice the change in licenses... Brian Barker 22:11, 27 April 2012 (EDT)

Once a photo has been made public under a more open licence they should not be able to change that to a more restrictive licence. The licence change normally goes by unnoticed. Tracking these changes seems like a difficult task. Eclecticology 01:45, 28 April 2012 (EDT)