Toby Bartels wrote:
How long until all text on Wikipedia is completely
rewritten? 5
years? 10?
That's a good question.
Everything that /I/ write on Wikipedia
is automatically free with /no/ restrictions,
because /everything/ that I write is free with no restrictions.
To be sure, such lack of restrictions applies only
insofar as what I've written is /new/ --
otherwise, the rest is still copyright as before,
and that material is licensed only under the GFDL.
But can it work to require people to dual license their submissions,
so long as the Creative Commons licence specifically applies
/only/ to the material that's new?
(For any given submission, that may be nothing, or everything.)
Does such an idea fit into copyright law at all?
Well, it's hard to say, but basically, I suspect that this approach
isn't helpful.
Here's the problem. Imagine that each of the following snippets is
GNU FDL.
'ADE' <---- original article
'AbDE' <-- revision, but under the terms of the GNU FDL, this *must*
be released under GNU FDL. Perhaps the 'B' portion is *also* released
under Attribution-ShareAlike.
After a sequence of further edits, including efforts by someone to
remove all of the original 'ADE' text, we end up with:
'abcde', where all of the parts are now released under GNU FDL and
Attribution-ShareAlike. But since each step along the way included
some GNU FDL, it *still* has to be released under GNU FDL.
And ONLY if 'abcde' is really a competely new aggregation of parts can
*any* of it be released under Attribution-ShareAlike.
For example, if I write "Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd President" and
release this under the GNU FDL, and you come in and add "Thomas
Jefferson was the 3rd President, and he had red hair." Well, your
work is a derivative work, and you have *no right* to release it under
Attribution-ShareAlike. I suppose you could release 'and he had red
hair' under Attribution-ShareAlike, but ai yi yi, what a mess.
But really, there are no significant problems with GNU FDL. It's
complicated, and it reads 'funny' in parts for our context. I wish it
were simpler, like Attribution-ShareAlike, but it isn't, so there you
go.
--Jimbo