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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

The bigger picture here is that the Wikimedia Foundation is apparently willing to spend donors' funds on defending the claimed right to publish this.

Is "professional photographers don't have the right to claim ownership over expensively set-up and finished work if an animal presses the shutter button" really an important principle of freedom of information worth fighting for?

Or is it more of a complicated case that may possibly be winnable through an arcane technicality in the US legal system, but even if successful would probably be less useful to the average Wikipedia-user than the equivalent amount spent on cleaning up existing copyright-free content. Nice as the image is, more useful and interesting stuff gets deleted from Wikipedia every day.

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This is my perspective as a donor.

I have gotten incredible value from wikipedia personally. So have most people I know. Wikipedia is incredibly efficient with money. They get a lot of valuable and entertaining educational material to a lot of people.

In fact, its been so useful and pleasurable to me and I reckon that it is such an efficient use of donor funds compared to nearly any other cause that I am willing to defer to their judgement. Use my money however you see fit.

Clarifying the class of physical phenomena which are considered legally able to hold copyright does sound like a foundational inquiry.

But I would not have expected a donation to Wikimedia to be put toward it.

Not really, it very rarely comes up. There are much bigger battles to fght.

One of the other legal fights they've started is to put online public domain artworks that have been scanned by museums at great expense since (at least in the US) "effort" alone is not enough to grant you copyright protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_W...

This seems to me to be exactly the kind of thing Wikipedia should be doing, though similarly there are some people outraged that the poor museums don't get to exploit a monopoly on the cultural works they control.

Just sparking debate about exactly what copyright is for is a good thing in my opinion, and helpful in fulfilling their mission:

"The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

With emphasis:

"The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower ... people ... to collect ... content ... in the public domain, and to disseminate it."

If you don't believe in that mission then donating to Wikipedia is probably not a recommended action.

Yes, Wikimedia is willing to spend money to defend against completely bogus copyright claims that contravene all law and precedent. You're welcome :-)

This is one of the best things that Wikipedia has ever spent money on. If Wikipedia has just been building up to a court case about whether art is uniquely human, then I think that would be enough to justify its existence, let alone the fun that can be had from browsing a load of stories that might be roughly accurate.

In this particular case I'm not sure, but I certainly do want Wikipedia to be zealous in challenging doubtful copyright take down requests in general so that we don't see, for example, all mention of Xenu removed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology.

They barely use any of the money they raise for Wikipedia itself. It's used for a wide variety of other purposes. As with all donations, once it's out of your pocket, you have no say on where the money goes.

[citation needed]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/75/2013-2...

40% of their projected expenses go to product & engineering. Last year they had expenses of 32.3 Million on 50.9 Million of revenue. Which really means they used 25% of raised money on product & engineering, and Wikipedia is definitely not it's only product.

They spend 24% on "Legal & CA, HR, Fin & Admin".

So they spend at least 64% on running the Wikimedia projects, no?

You forgot to take out the 16% they spent on grants, the 9% on fundraising, the 9% on grant making and development.

I agree with wikimedias stance though... its not a legal technicality, its just not a common topic. The law is quite clear. If an animal or nature makes some thing then it belongs to no one. Its public domain

The monkey was aiming the camera, so what effort did the camera owner put into setting up the shot? The monkey aimed the camera and pressed the button. No one owns the copyright.

The Wikimedia Foundation long ago fell to the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Many people assume they're donating to cover server costs, and Wikipedia's advertising is carefully constructed to avoid challenging this assumption. But in fact most servers are already donated inclusive of all costs by large companies like Google and Yahoo. Most donations go to funding the ever-increasing Wikimedia payroll.

You actually have some proof for these silly insinuating claims you're making? The Wikimedia Foundation produces monthly reports on everything that they do, and large part of donations are actually used to 'run the servers'.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,...

moreover, exactly what other parties would be in this oligarchy?

Oh, I think Imm means that wikipedia is run for the benefit of its runners. Just like companies are run (in practice) for the benefit of the managers---no matter what stories we tell about shareholder capitalism.

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