koyaanisqatsi wrote:
Toby wrote:
What!? how could this possibly be? Why would the GNU FDL be stricter than ordinary copyright law? If I quote a line from a biography of Winston Churchill in my own FDL biography, why must that be invariant? This doesn't make any sense to me.
Speaking only for text, you'd have an ethical (and, quite possibly, a legal) obligation to leave the quotation as-is; otherwise you're saying someone said something they did not.
As-is to an extent that avoids lying, yes, but not to the extent that fixes an invariant section. For example, if an original (by Dr. X) said "Churchill was a pompous windbag that everybody hated.", then I might write "Dr. X wrote "Churchill was a pompous windbag".", which is fair use in the context of an encyclopaedia article, and release that under the FDL. Then a derivative FDL encyclopaedia should be able to shorten it to "Dr. X called Churchill "a pompous windbag".", but that wouldn't be possible if my FDL release classified the quotation as an invariant section.
And I'd be surprised if writing "Dr. X said that Churchill was *not* "a pompous windbag"." would be a violation of any ordinary copyright law, although it would still be *intellectually* dishonest and unethical, and possibly even illegal as a matter of *libel* (if Dr. X felt that being cast as a supporter of Churchill's was a defamation of character).
-- Toby