On 5/9/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2007/5/9, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
"In cases like these where the materials complement each other, we believe that the end result is a derivative work."
This contains two useful distinctions. The materials have been chosen to complement each other to form a unit of presumably increased value or greater use rather than just being aggregated. And *the end result* is the derivative work, not the text or the photo, so legal causality isn't broken.
What I am curious about is what exactly this "end result" is (collective work, new multimedia work, or ...?) and how far-reaching this effect is (particularly with regard to e.g. contextual advertising).
I'd say the effect is very far-reaching - it means that if you incorporate a GFDL image in a work, you should put the whole resulting work under the GFDL. And since the original work can easily be created as a derivative of the resulting GFDL work (by removal of the image), in effect the original work has been made GFDL too.
Yes, I don't think there's any other way to read what is written. One more reason not to use the GFDL for images. But...
What's more, it also means that it is not allowed to put CC-BY-SA images in Wikipedia, so they will have to go too.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2007-05-08-fdl-scope does *not* actually say that, nor does it say anything which implies that. It says, essentially, that you can't use a GFDLed image in a non GFDLed article, but it doesn't say that you can't use a non-GFDLed image in a GFDLed article. Allegedly (according to Jimbo a few years ago) Stallman had explicitly stated that it is *OK* to use a "fair use" image in a GFDLed text, and if a non-free image is OK, surely a CC-BY-SA one is.
CC-BY-SA has different terms than the GFDL regarding collections. You can read the CC-BY-SA definition of "collection" at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
Anthony