From: "Alexandre Dulaunoy" alexandre.dulaunoy@ael.be
On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Erik Moeller wrote:
Alex-
I think what he is trying to say is that Wikipedia is one
encyclopedia,
and the GFDL does not require a history for each section of the
publication
but for the whole publication.
When I view a Wikipedia article, I can view the article directly -- I do not have to pass through a title page, as I would when viewing an FDL- licensed book. I could search for "Donald Rumsfeld" on Google and immediately end up on the Wikipedia article about him.
Or on the McFly article, in which case I would be told nothing about the fact that the article is licensed under the GNU FDL, or about its
history,
its authors etc.
This is clearly in violation of both the letter and the spirit of our license.
Before a violation of the license, it's a violation of the copyright/author's rights. References to the authors has been removed. This case is before a licensing issue, it's a violation of the copyright. The nuance is quite important because we don't go directly of the question of licensing and its validity. Various cases around GNU GPL was not around the license itself but only on the violation of the author's rights principle.
Why is it a violation of author's rights? There is no law that says you have to have a copyright notice on every page of a book and a web site is like a book. You open the book and look at the page, you link into a web site and see the page. If you want to see the copyright you go to the title page of the book or the main page of the web site. There is nowhere in the GFDL that says that you have to link to each page of a web site? In fact the GFDL was not written for web sites, it was written for "documentation manuals". If it is applied by someone to a web site without modification then that person (or entity or group of people) is suggesting that the web site is like a book, no? I doubt any judge would say that Wikipedia requires downstream users to interpret the GFDL the way Wikipedians say it should be interpreted. It is not their license and it is interpreted the way any other legal text is interpreted.
I am not saying that I agree with what McFly Network is doing, just that there are links back to Wikipedia and that the texts are "considered released under the GFDL" and there may be a reading of the GFDL that would say that McFly Network is in compliance with the GFDL, try and convince me otherwise, please.
Alex756