On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Delirium wrote:
Till Westermayer wrote:
but wouldn't the inclusion of our copylefted material because of the meme-viral character of that material make IMDB and others going GNU?
That's a bit of a tricky issue, because the GFDL doesn't seem to have been intended for websites, but books. In a book, I think this would be the case -- if you took someone's book, and added a few chapters to it, you'd have to FDL the whole thing, not just the original chapters. Similarly, if you published a book on movie history and included stuff from Wikipedia, you'd have to FDL the whole book, including your own writings.
I'm not sure if this carries over to a website though. Can a website have only certain sections FDL'd (say, the reviews) and consider the rest of them a separate work, even if they happen to appear on the same page? The analogy to books would say no, but I'm not sure.
I would say that even in books, the answer could be yes, provided that the part which falls under the GNU/FDL is clearly set apart and labelled as such. In my opinion, a work of which part is from the GNU/FDL and part not, could fall under:
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, does not as a whole count as a Modified Version of the Document, provided no compilation copyright is claimed for the compilation. Such a compilation is called an "aggregate", and this License does not apply to the other self-contained works thus compiled with the Document, on account of their being thus compiled, if they are not themselves derivative works of the Document.
If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one quarter of the entire aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on covers that surround only the Document within the aggregate. Otherwise they must appear on covers around the whole aggregate.
Andre Engels