user_Jamesday wrote:
Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering
the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication
to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a
license incompatible with all of their existing licenses. That rules out any likely form
of copyleft if the project is to achieve its major goal, though with sufficient studying
of all of the contracts news publishers have with their new sources I suppose it's
conceivable that some form of copyleft license could be written to be incompatible with a
small enough set of them for small publishers to use stories.
Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work.
That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published
as widely as possible.
I've been lurking on here and I felt I need to respond to this message.
Copyleft is not to limit people who can use a work (like software or a
book), but rather a way to force attribution and to avoid pitfalls of
the "public domain" documents. If it is in the "public domain", all
you
have to do is a minor change and suddenly the work can now be
copyrighted. The publisher does not have to clarify what is free
material that can be copied and what is original new material. An
example of this is the Clement C. Moore Poem "'Twas the Night Before
Christmas", which is in the public domain (due to copyright expiration),
but often they change the final phrase from "Happy Christmas" to "Merry
Christmas", call it a new work, and copyright the book. To enforce it
more, publishers also include new illustrations of Santa, but if you
read inside the cover there is no mention that the poem itself is in the
public domain.
This is where the GFDL is very different, as anything that copies a GFDL
licenced document must also specify somehow what rights you have as an
end consumer. The same is true for GPL'd software as well.
Even the BSD license (which has almost no real restrictions) does have
the attribution clause that forces you to acknowledge from whom you got
the document and that it is copyrighted material.
And in the case of "mainstream" news agencies, including television &
radio stations (as well as print media), when they cover something from
a wire agency they almost always give attribution in the form of
"According to the Associated Press" or "from wire reports" or "as
published in a copyrighted article in the Washington Post". In this
case Wikinews has the potential of becoming another news outlet where
newspapers would start out with something like "Moscow (Wikinews) -
President Putin..."
Where I think the license discussion should go along is to discuss what
features authors would like to see, what features from common copyleft
licenses most people here hate, and what the overall goals of the
project are. A copyleft license can be applied to a news article that
could also be republished by "mainstream" news outlets.... the two are
not mutually incompatable. Unfortunately most of the discussion I've
seen so far is going into the gritty details and political camps of each
different license.
IMHO, I think a simple attribution that the story came from Wikinews,
and in print media something in a little more detail giving either a URL
to Wikinews or a statement in the copyright section of the publication
(most magazines and newspapers have them buried on page 3 or on the
editorial page somewhere... usually in very fine print) that says
Wikinews articles are republished under the XXX license. see
http://www.example.com for more details. Web magazines can do something
very similar (as well as websites for mainstream news organizations that
want to republish wikinews pieces). Television news broadcasts
typically have a quick blurb at the end giving credit to news sources,
especially if it is from another network or station. These usually
scroll by so quickly that you can hardly read them, but are a way to
give attribution.
The point here is to acknowledge that somebody other than that news
agency created the story, and they are only republishing what can be
obtained elsewhere as a convience to their readers. I don't see how
this really limits who or how you can use content that is copylefted,
and is incompatable with commercial news wire licenses only if those
other licenses specifically mention that they can't be used together
with other wire services or specifically mention copylefted news
articles used simultaneously in the same publication. It is likely that
at least in the USA such prohibitions could also be made illegal due to
anti-trust laws, and I know the EU also has simular anti-competition
laws as well, protecting a small-town newspaper that might want to use
Wikinews articles in their publication (for instance).
--
Robert Scott Horning