>>>> "ph" ==
<perl(a)hush.ai> writes:
ph> I would think that we would be able to use work originally
ph> licensed under the cc license on wikipedia even if we
ph> relicense it under the GFDL. There is nothing in the cc
ph> license that says we can't.
(I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.)
Hurgh. Well, that depends on the CC license you're talking
about. There are 11 core licenses, and several additional ones.
Any Creative Commons license that has the ShareAlike license element
has this clause in the license:
"You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or
publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms
of this License, [...] You may not offer or impose any terms on the
Derivative Works that alter or restrict the terms of this License
or the recipients' exercise of the rights granted hereunder, [...]"
In other words, you're not allowed to add additional licenses, or
change the license. That's the essence of copyleft. You use _exactly_
the same license for derived works. Same thing for the GFDL, btw:
"You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document
under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you
release the Modified Version under precisely this License,"
Non-copyleft licenses don't have that kind of restriction. But most of
the CC licenses that aren't copyleft have other provisions
(NoDerivatives, NonCommercial) that make
them unsuitable for incorporating into GFDL material. Derivatives of
works licensed under the Attribution license (just requires
attribution) could probably be licensed under the GFDL.
The original creator can offer a work under any license or licenses
they want. Dual licenses would probably work.
ph> I think some wikipedians even use photos that are licensed
ph> under the cc.
This all depends on what the "Document" is in the GFDL (called the
"Work" in CC licenses). It's not stated on the copyrights page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
...or anywhere else that I know of what the Document is, but I think
we tend to treat them as individual images and individual articles,
_separately_. So it's OK to put images and articles together that have
different licenses. Taking elements of a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike-licensed image, say, and making a GFDL'd image,
would not be OK: it'd be making a Derivative Work, which has to be
under exactly the by-sa.
Needless to say, this is hairy stuff. Why not avoid it wherever
possible?
~ESP
--
Evan Prodromou <evan(a)wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel -
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