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.
--
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