Simon Kissane wrote:
Each individual article in Wikipedia is released under the FDL. They are completely separable by potential users.
But section 6 of the license reads "You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its license notice. The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy."
Therefore even if you release each Wikipedia article individually under the FDL, someone can combine them all, and delete all but one of the Wikipedia linking tables, since they would fall under "multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy."
They aren't identical. Each one links back to the original article. (Or should have -- it does now. The whole point is to make the original available.)
Require the HTML if you are publishing in any medium? But give you permission to render it in another medium? So what then are we requiring -- the HTML code, or what the HTML code renders? And if only what the HTML code renders, how accurate a rendition is necessary?
I can't imagine that anyone will really quibble over this.
I suppose someone might put up a web page, and put the HTML there, but in such a fashion that it is invisible, despite our clean intention. Would we be able to prevent that? Maybe, maybe not. But I just don't see it really coming up. Public pressure alone would be sufficient to prevent it, I think.
The FDL says that invariant sections are invariant, i.e. that they must be presented exactly as the licensee grantor specifies. A reasonable court would reasonably rule that this means that you can't print it in invisible ink, for example. You can't print it on an HTML page in such a way that it can't be seen in a browser.
Well, I think the license implies that "rendered exactly" refers primarily to identical text. Otherwise, if you wanted to include images or fonts or tables, I couldn't redistribute the document in plain text. And, considering the object and purpose of the FDL, it seems clear that such a restriction, prohibiting distribution in certain media, is contrary to the license. As I interpret it, the FDL requires redistribution of the identical text, but not the same presentation or machine encoding of the text.
Right, but so what?
Yes, but only insofar as the invariant sections comply with the FDL definition of an invariant section. Which as I said I doubt your invariant sections do. But anyway, as I pointed out above, even if they are valid invariant sections, you still can't impose a requirement for them to occur on every single page, if multiple Wikipedia pages are reproduced.
O.k., there are two objections here.
First, that these invariant sections may not comply. But you have to be specific about why not? Under the license, an Invariant section is a kind of Seconary section, and the only restriction on a Secondary section is that it not be *about* the topic of the article, and may deal with "matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them. "
Perhaps we should tweak the notice to more clearly fall within that?
Second, your objection about multiple pages and identical notices relies on the notice being identical on each page, but it isn't.
One thing I will grant you -- because none of this has really come up in any real context, we haven't bothered to use all the terminology of the FDL throughout the site consistently. That's what we're trying to do now.