--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Imran Ghory wrote:
The question before us then is this; can we state
on our Wikibooks
copyright policy page and on every edit page that
by pressing
save, that the submitter is agreeing to grant
Wikimedia a
non-exclusive right to license to use their own
unique and
copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/
any other copyleft
license the Foundation may deem fit in the future
(with a
defintion of "copyleft" linked from that word)?
Yes.
The problem I see with this is that it precludes people from cutting and pasting text from GNU FDL-only sources such as Wikipedia. The reason is that the person who is pasting it has *no right* to tell us that we can relicense that text under a different license.
I still think there's some promise in the notion of a disjunctive license, but I'm still puzzling it out with the authorities.
Question two: Would such a notice prevent us
from using purely FDL
work (such as from Wikipedia)?
Yes. The person who is importing the work will not
be able to legally save
the page and meet the required conditions.
Oh, I see Imran says the same as me.
I think this is an insurmountable obstacle for us on this particular front.
Related question: If the above is true then
could we add such a notice to
Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions
(we would also have to
contact every current and past contributor we
could in order to ask them
about the change in copyright terms; if they say
no or we can't find them
their text will only be under the FDL)?
That's right, we could do that, but what a tracking nightmare! Every article in Wikipedia would have to be flagged somehow.
This *could* conceivably work, though. We could set up software tools to allow signed-in contributors to click-agree that all of their past contributions can be flexibly licensed.
But unless we have a *really good* reason, and I don't see that we do, we shouldn't do this.
--Jimbo
What if we ask the FSF if we can consider a different licence the "sucessor" to the FDL 1.2 for only wikipedia's purposes. They probably won't do it, but it's worth a try. -LDan
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