I made a couple of changes to [[wikipedia:copyright]], explained on the talk page. The most important one was to take out all references to "special permission materials". Reading through the page, I found that we actually had three categories of materials: * GFDL * fair use * "special permission", which means that the copyright holder gives permission to use the material *only for Wikipedia*.
The third category of materials was added by Lee on Aug 27, 2002. I don't think it was properly discussed, and I disagree with it. The fair use situation is already bad enough. Adding "special permission" materials on top of that makes free reuse of Wikipedia next to impossible.
If fair use cannot be justified and GFDL permission cannot be obtained, then the material simply cannot be used in a project that claims to be freely reusable.
There is also a legal issue: contributors license their article under GFDL to the public. If somebody else adds material to that article, then they are technically creating a derivative work, and are *required* to license all of it under GFDL, i.e. they cannot insist on a special permission only for Wikipedia.
Axel
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Axel Boldt wrote:
- GFDL
These are golden.
- fair use
These we should be cautious and skeptical about.
- "special permission", which means that the copyright holder gives
permission to use the material *only for Wikipedia*.
These are very bad, and I'm in favor of removing them completely.
Adding "special permission" materials on top of that makes free reuse of Wikipedia next to impossible.
Agreed.
If fair use cannot be justified and GFDL permission cannot be obtained, then the material simply cannot be used in a project that claims to be freely reusable.
There is also a legal issue: contributors license their article under GFDL to the public. If somebody else adds material to that article, then they are technically creating a derivative work, and are *required* to license all of it under GFDL, i.e. they cannot insist on a special permission only for Wikipedia.
This problem does come up for texts, but doesn't necessarily come up for images. That is, someone could give us special permission to use an image, and unless someone downloaded the image, edited, and uploaded it, the problem you identify here wouldn't come up.
But I completely agree that special (non-GFDL) permission is a very bad thing for us.
--Jmibo