I have recently been discussing a possible change in licensing for my future works.

The details of that discussion aren't important at the moment, but there is one point I would like to raise before the larger community.

I was told by Lupo (whom I eminently respect) and others that adding binding copyleft [1] provisions to my work would be incompatible with the concept of "free works" that Commons employs. [2]

In broad terms, the kind of copyleft I was considering is the strongly viral sort. Specifically, if you use this image, then the remainder of the document/work that it appears in must be either have been released from copyright or be placed under one of several acceptable copylefts (e.g. GFDL, CC-BY-SA). It has always been my intention that this be applied in such a way as to be compatible with Wikipedia, Citizendium, Encyclopedia of Earth, other works published under copyleft.

Paradoxically, I was told that a requirement for making future works free is itself "unfree", since Commons adopts the position that freedom must be "available to anyone, anywhere, anytime" [2], and requiring copyleft on the larger document unduly restricts who can use it and when.

One of this reasons this confuses me is because Stallman and the FSF already consider the GFDL to be strongly viral. In specifics, their intent was that the "aggregation" provisions of the GFDL be construed narrowly, and that all other works be classed as "modified versions" such that the work as a whole would be subject to copyleft. Specifically the aggregation provisions in the GFDL says that a work may be combined "with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium... if the copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit." [3] They really intended this to be limited to situations like seperate documents on hard drive, or seperate songs on CD, where the relevant works are very clearly distinct and independent. It is not legitimate, in the FSF opinion, to mix GFDL images or text with materials that are less free than the GFDL in any single document.

As you may be aware, this is not the same as the position of Creative Commons with respect to CC-BY-SA. Creative Commons considers their copyleft to be much less viral and only apply to directly modified works. In other words, the copyleft on CC-BY-SA images only requires a further copyleft on modified images, and not on any of the accompanying materials. In particular, you can mix CC-BY-SA images with generic copyrighted text, without violating their terms.

This difference in viral degree reflects the different goals of the FSF vs. CC, with the former focused on creating free content while the latter is more focused on giving options to authors and changing the way copyright works. You may also be aware that resolving this is one of the sticking points in discussions to make the GFDL and CC-BY-SA compatible.

Having summarized the above, I consider my position as closely aligned with the FSF interpretation of the GFDL. In other words I want free works to be those that give rise to more free works by virally expanding copyleft. I've been told that in effect this is not an acceptable goal for materials on Commons. And by immediate extension that the FSF interpretation of the GFDL is also essentially "unfree". (I will note that a strict application of the GFDL copyleft would exclude the use CC-BY-SA on any page bearing GFDL content, and in practice that is not the way Common/Wikimedia behaves.) It is also worth noting that I already apply the FSF interpretation of the GFDL with respect to the GFDL images I have published. In other words, I expect and demand that reusers copyleft their documents when they incorporate my GFDL images into them

So, I would like to get feedback from the community about whether viral copyright is acceptable within the context of Commons' free content goals? And if not, what should be done about the GFDL which the license's authors (and some publishers, like myself) already consider to be strongly viral, even though in practice the Wikimedia projects don't often treat it that way.

-Robert A. Rohde

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft [2] http://freedomdefined.org/Definition - Definition of Free Works [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_Li...