On Dec 3, 2007 11:53 AM, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: [snip] Jimmy, intentionally or not you're addressing a strawman. No one *here* has advocated that any copyleft license would only permit you to use a covered work if everything 'near' it is freely licensed, as such it's not helpful to refute that position. The reason that we in the world of free content group should tolerate its imposition at all is because when used correctly copyleft has a substantial pay-off. Copyleft can create that little bit of friction needed to move people into the realm of freely licensing their own works. For example, a programmer is making a command line app and he wants command history and line editing ... if he freely licenses his work he can use GNU READLINE, saving himself about 30,000 lines of tricky programming. If he doesn't freely license his work, he can write his own or find some other alternative, perhaps one that costs a bit of money. Likewise, consider a teacher writing a supplemental guide for a class. The teacher needs illustrations for the guide. They (or their institution) could pay a fee to use an image library, they could create their own images, or hire a photographer, or perhaps they could choose to freely license their work and gain access to copyleft illustrations which they can use to build their guide. In either of these cases, programming or educational materials, the majority of the copyrighted works created are never intended to be sold as a product. Freely licensing them is harmless. But because of the weak possibility of future income from these works, and simply because of the power of the default people usually do not choose to freely release these works. Copyleft can create the needed incentive, and at the same time allow everyone feel like they are getting a fair deal. It's true that many copyleft licenses have additional characteristics. For example, they might help ensure that the original unmodified work doesn't somehow fall out of the free world. But these effects can be achieved without copyleft. The exact functionality needed to make copyleft work the best differs from work to work. People use software applications in different ways from scientific illustrations or poetry. It's been my position, and that of at least several others here, that in the case of illustrations that copyleft somehow bound to the image borders doesn't accomplish much -- because the normal way the people build new works out of images is through synchronization, not internal modification. Our experience on Wikimedia Commons is that, even for images taken from outside sources like flickr, we seldom make modifications to images themselves... and that the modifications which do get made are generally trivial (cropping, rotation, perhaps color correction). A copyleft that doesn't substantially encourage people to make more freely licensed works is just another copyright related imposition, it's harmful and without public or even private benefit and should be avoided. [quoting the part I removed from the top] I have no doubt that there are many people and companies who will profit greatly from the effective removal or substantial reduction of the copyleft status of many works in wikis currently under the GFDL. However, that isn't how the authors choose to license their works.

My personal, concrete experience of these matters is that authors willing to use my images (which are licenced under CC-BY-SA) feel the need to write to me to acertain the autorisation. One even mentionned that he would not have written if I had licenced my images under CC-By (which I do not wish to). So arguably, the ambiguity on this matter is harming the diffusion of our work. Because for one person who writes to me, several maybe decide that they won't bother, and probably more misunderstand the licence and assume that using Free images has effect on the entirety of their work. -- Rama (PS: I also find my images here and there without attribution or with the attribution but without a licence, but that's another matter :p)