user_Jamesday wrote: 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