[Commons-l] Dual-Licensing Commons

[Brianna Laugher]

On 10/02/07, nilfanion wiki <nilfanion at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I had a random thought today and think it is worth a cursory consideration.
> Would it be (1) desirable, (2) technically feasible and (3) legal to
> relicense Commons under a dual GFDL / Creative Commons license as opposed to
> the current GFDL state?

I agree it would be painful to pursue this. (ie painful enough not to bother)

> An image is uploaded to Commons as CC-by-sa-2.5. A third party then makes
> use of the image, under the terms of the CC license. In addition to the
> image, they copy the description on the Image: page to use as their caption.
> As the text of the page is licensed under the GFDL, would this downstream
> user have violated the GFDL?

Hmmm I never considered Image: pages like that. I hope it is not true.
As far as I'm concerned, Image: pages are just like meta-data and
shouldn't contain any text that is too copyrightable. (Do we care
about our Template:Information or license templates? I doubt it.) So
what's left - the uploader's description, in some cases that's
nothing, in a few cases it might be a thoughtful paragraph.
The edit box says 'you agree to submit this text under the GFDL' but
Special:Upload doesn't.

OK let's see... if you did copy the caption and didn't credit it as
GFDL, who would be able to claim their copyright was violated? That
would be anyone who edited the image page, in most cases only the
uploader (I doubt the re-user would copy the categories, so
maintenance work probably wouldn't matter anyway). [Note: not
Wikimedia Commons, or WMF.] Now they (uploaders) are submitting their
work under a free license. They write a description not as a creative
effort but as a basic descriptive effort that accompanies the media.
Are they really like to consider their rights violated and WANT to
prosecute anything? It seems extremely unlikely to me.

So I think
1) it won't ever be a real issue, and
2) It would be good if we could change the GFDL to only apply to
non-Image: pages, and make all Image: contents PD as Greg mentions.
Definitely too difficult to do retroactively, but might be possible
from a certain date in the future, if we thought it was worth
pursuing.

Anyway interesting question, these are always worth pursuing.

cheers
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise