On 5/24/05, thomas-edison @ ziplip. com thomas-edison@ziplip.com wrote:
As for Matt, aka Morven: I'm not a special case, unless you consider knowing copyright law to be a special case. :-) You want to test your copyright knowledge with me, bring it on. Send in every lawyer, scholar, and diplomat you can find, and I'll talk to them all in civil manner. But it will not matter in the end: The GFDL simply cannot apply to quotes. No license can change the law. Therefore, if I or you or anyone quotes something on Wikipedia, it is not GFDLed. I'm sorry if that shakes your faith in the GFDL, but that's the way it is. You can make whatever license you want, but you can't change U.S. copyright law.
Quotes from others are not placed under the GFDL merely by being placed into a GFDL work, no. Quotes from your own works that you are contractually forbidden from relicensing would probably also be in that situation.
Also, since your own words are your own, nothing prohibits you from placing them in Wikipedia under Wikipedia's license and also placing them elsewhere under any conditions you choose.
But the very point is: wikipedia insists that you choose to license your textual contributions - to any namespace - under the GFDL. If you refuse to do so, YOU CANNOT CONTRIBUTE TO WIKIPEDIA. I fail to see the problem here.
If you wish, you may of course publish larger essays you wish to refer to on sites external to Wikipedia, and refer to them in your Wikipedia talk page contributions. Those essays, then, would be not licensed under the GFDL - but your contributions to Wikipedia would be.
-Matt (User:Morven)