On 2/9/07, nilfanion wiki nilfanion@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 don't no strong feelings about this, but I feel it is worthy of a discussion. If it IS possible and legal (I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if it is possible or not), I think there might be beneficial effects of it. For example, imagine the following scenario:
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?
If the answer to this question is yes, then there could be significant benefits to a dual-licensing of Commons itself. If this went anywhere, I'd imagine the final decision would be made by the Foundation, but the community ought to think it over first...
What do people think? (If its daft, don't hold your punches I don't mind)
/me punches *WHAM* :)
I think the biggest reason that this wouldn't be a huge point would be because most image pages should not be substantial enough to be copyright deserving.
In whatever cases they are, they probably have copied wikipedia text... which would complicate things.
Any finally, I'm not all that convinced that an additional complex license for the image page would make a lot of sense. I'm no fan of creating additional market place confusion by promoting the Creative Commons any more than we must, ... if we really have cause to think the license of image pages is a problem for folks we should request instead that people release their image page edits into something effectively equal to the public domain.