Well I guess it will be my turn to "try" to explain the meaning and the
legal issues of the CC licenses.
But, this legal uncertainty will stay for long (there are several other
issues), it is the reason why I strongly recommended the WNL License for
precision and legal safety, as well as dual-licensing for good and
simple compatibility with other projects.
I hope the legal policy will continue evolving between WN emerges from
beta to its final stage.
Angela wrote:
Any edits made previously remain public domain - it is
only new edits
that will need to be under this Creative Commons License.
you meant in fact
"remain public domain or the other licence which
each project had chosen", I suppose.
Yes, that is what I meant. Edits remain whatever they originally were
(often PD, but I realise this wasn't the case for some wikis). If any
text was licensed under something not compatible with CC-BY, it might
be best to protect those pages and note on them that they were
licensed under <whatever>.
One technical question: can "CC-By-2.1-(a
certain country) or later"
switch to merely "CC-By-2.5" or "CC-By-2.5-(another certain country)?
I don't know enough about the iCommons licenses to know whether that
switch is permitted.
Being the translator of the CC licenses for France and an IP license
specialist, I can say that there is no clear answer for this question.
It mainly depend from national legislations, but it also depends from
the practical process that it will follow.
Still, I doubt it would be valid if it's only done through an
annoucement on the WN website. One way or another, it would necessarily
need the authors of WN to express their agreement for this change.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron
CERSA-CNRS PARIS 2