koyaanisqatsi wrote:
Toby wrote:
>What!? how could this possibly be?
>Why would the GNU FDL be stricter than ordinary copyright law?
>If I quote a line from a biography of Winston Churchill
>in my own FDL biography, why must that be invariant?
>This doesn't make any sense to me.
Speaking only for text, you'd have an ethical (and,
quite possibly, a legal)
obligation to leave the quotation as-is; otherwise you're saying someone said
something they did not.
As-is to an extent that avoids lying, yes,
but not to the extent that fixes an invariant section.
For example, if an original (by Dr. X) said
"Churchill was a pompous windbag that everybody hated.",
then I might write "Dr. X wrote "Churchill was a pompous windbag".",
which is fair use in the context of an encyclopaedia article,
and release that under the FDL. Then a derivative FDL encyclopaedia
should be able to shorten it to "Dr. X called Churchill "a pompous
windbag".",
but that wouldn't be possible if my FDL release classified the quotation
as an invariant section.
And I'd be surprised if writing "Dr. X said that Churchill was *not*
"a pompous windbag"." would be a violation of any ordinary copyright law,
although it would still be *intellectually* dishonest and unethical,
and possibly even illegal as a matter of *libel*
(if Dr. X felt that being cast as a supporter of Churchill's
was a defamation of character).
-- Toby