Commons:ライセンス/Justifications
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このページの要旨： 商用利用や改変を許可するライセンスのもとで自由な作品を公開することで、個人や小規模事業者がこれまで不可能だった新しい活用方法を見出し、社会全体に価値を生み出すことができます。フェアユースは制約が多すぎるため、利用の自由度が低くなります。また、GFDLは形式上受け入れられていますが、実際には扱いが難しく、あまり実用的ではありません。 |
Wikimedia Commonsでは、メディアの受け入れ基準に関して、重要な制限が設けられています。この制限により、本来ならプロジェクトに役立つ可能性のあるさまざまな自由なメディアが除外されることがありますが、それらは特別な必要がある場合に限り例外的に受け入れられます。このページでは、こうした制限が存在する理由について説明しています。
Wikimedia Commonsの基本的な目的は、WikipediaなどのWikimediaプロジェクトで使用されるメディアを保存する実用的なリポジトリとして機能することです。もしそれが唯一の目的であれば、Wikipedia専用のメディアや、非営利利用のみ許可されたメディアも問題なく受け入れられるでしょう。なぜなら、Wikimedia財団はコンテンツの提供に対して金銭的な対価を受け取っていないからです。
私たちのライセンス方針における追加の制限は、最終的な目標に基づいています。それは、Wikimediaサイトのすべてのコンテンツ（メディアもテキストも含む）を、面倒な制約や費用の負担なしに、世界中のさまざまな場面で自由に活用できるようにすることです。では、「自由に活用」とは何を指すのでしょうか？Wikimediaのコンテンツを活かした活用例をいくつかご紹介します：
- 印刷媒体: Wikimediaのコンテンツが、書籍、雑誌、学術誌などの印刷物で活用されることを推奨しています。たとえ 1 つの段落や画像、記事全体であっても、広く使われることが重要です。特に、電子メディアへのアクセスが制限されている発展途上国や政治的に孤立した地域では、印刷物が情報を届ける貴重な手段となります。Wikimedia財団はサイトを運営していますが、印刷のための資金やリソースを持っていません。そのため、自由に利用可能な高品質コンテンツの価値を活かし、営利企業が印刷・流通を行うことで、より多くの人に情報が届く仕組みとなっています。
- Research: Wikimedia content is routinely used as a corpus and object of study in research areas such as information retrieval, computer vision, and even graph theory and sociology. Much of this research is conducted by for-profit institutions with research divisions, who would not have access to this information under a noncommercial license. See this page for more information.
- Derivative works: Without being able to create derivative works, we cannot improve (crop, refocus, restore, etc.) images. The rise of the Internet has compellingly demonstrated that the wide availability of a variety of free works facilitates novel creative combination of those works in new works of art and new educational resources, an effect explicitly exploited by websites such as deviantART (see also free culture). Many of these works would never be created without access to free source materials. Content creators who dedicate their careers to creating new content must sell at least some of these derivative works to make a living; this is a commercial reuse.
- Small business: A large business can afford to hire researchers to produce informational resources on topics relevant to their product, in order to better inform customer decisions. Small local businesses with more limited and less specialized resources often struggle to compete in this area. The free availability of a high-quality public information resource helps to lower the barrier to entry in these areas and encourage more competition and better access to relevant resources for customers.
A recurring theme in all these scenarios is commercial reuse and derivative use. Without commercial use, professional artists, industrial research labs, republishers, and small businesses are cut out of the loop. Without derivative use, not only can new works of art not be created, but content cannot be properly integrated with existing services, and research that automatically manipulates, aggregates, or changes the presentation of content cannot be done. In short, the purpose of free licenses at Wikimedia Commons is not to save businesses and professionals the hassle of producing content themselves, but to enable new applications that would have previously been considered too expensive to justify.
Most content whose license does not permit commercial use can be used commercially under the doctrine of fair use (or fair dealing in the UK), but the terms of fair use are extremely limited and depend strongly on context. A work that may be fair use in the context of a Wikipedia article on our website may cease to be fair use in an article republished for profit, or in a professional artwork that creatively incorporates the work, or even in a work that abridges the content. Moreover, fair use limits the quality and extent of such a work that can be used, which in turn limits its potential value for reuse. These subtle limitations make the reuse, commercial or otherwise, of any fair use content fraught with legal peril; for this reason, many Wikimedia sites have rejected its use altogether. Because Commons can only host media that are usable on all Wikimedia sites, we have no option but to exclude fair-use-only media altogether.
Wikimedia Commons also strongly disfavors content offered under licenses that impose impractical restrictions. For example, the GFDL technically requires that the complete license, a many-page document, be included with every copy of a work - even if the work is much smaller than the license! This type of restriction limits the scope of practical reuse. The Creative Commons licenses that Wikimedia Commons promotes help to balance the needs of content reusers, who want the attribution and license statement to be concise and practical, with the desires of the author, who often wish to be credited for their work.