On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
One worrying thing that i noticed is that in some of these projects there is no strict adherence to GFDL-only text. Since my first day in Wikipedia i understood how important the GFDL is. I understood that articles cannot be copied verbatim even from sources whose copyright terms allow copying for non-commercial usage, because the "free" in "The Free Encyclopedia" does not refer only to price.
Well, there is even more of that than you describe.
There are projects that are either unable or unvilling to enforce proper licencing of images. (Read: many/most images are without any copyright templates.)
I intentionally limited my description of the problem to text. Image fair use is a separate issue.
There are projects that, despite dedicating significant attention to copyright issues, have significant amount of material copied from print sources, and thus practically undetectable.
Yes, this exists. I am referring to cases where the projects (not just single contributors) are aware that the license of the text is not GFDL.
This may come as a surprise to Westerners, but most people out there are not really aware of copyright. Intelligent, educated adults may have no knowledge or understanding of it, and rise a protest when you tell them they can't copy text from somewhere.
True: I intentionally wrote "aware that the license of the text is not GFDL" above, because it is possible that they think that "free as in beer" is GFDL-compatible.
I would volunteer to approach such projects with an explanation of the importance of the GFDL, but i am not a lawyer and not an official representative of WMF. The WMF can tell me to "be bold", but since i am not talking about cases of singular articles, but whole projects which apparently have a policy of disregard to GFDL compatibility, i am quite unsure. The legitimacy of a project may be in question, so i am reluctant to handle it all by myself.