On Dec 1, 2007 7:31 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Gregory, please drop this position, it's pointless and unconstructive. Here is what CC-BY-SA 3.0 says:
Erik, I have no disagreement with the *text* of the license on this matter. My comment on this point was very clearly focused on the steward organizations and their practices and intentions.
The CC-By-SA text, which you quoted incompletely, is fairly unambiguous: it even goes out of its way to point out that you are subject to the copyleft when you combine covered sound or video to create a new work
What is problematic is that the Creative Commons has advised people with advice that is at odds with the license.
You could say that only the license matters. But that simply isn't true: not everyone has the time, willingness, or the resources to litigate every confused situation that Creative Commons creates. And certainly the intention matters because subsequent license versions can be made reflect that intention.
Here's what the GFDL says: The clauses are highly similar in nature. And they are ambiguous;
[snip]
In fact, I've previously that the CC-by-SA is even less ambiguous, and the GFDL could use revision so that the meaning is more clear to lay readers. However, Neither license is excessively legally ambiguous.
The important distinction is that while Creative Commons has appeased certain reusers by claiming that SA doesn't extend an effective copyleft to images, in contrast to the historically established and widely understood meaning of the license, the FSF responded to Creative Common's erroneous claims that the GFDL was intended to function in the same way with a statement that affirmed the copyleft nature of the GFDL (http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2007-05-08-fdl-scope).