Marco Krohn wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>[Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l>
and <wikipedia-l>
>to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.]
thanks.
The Reply-To: header is my friend! ^_^
>But Wikipedia needs to make it easy by separating
out the "fair use" pics
>and not claiming any longer that they are being distributed under the GFDL.
or we stay GFDL (as the FAQ says) and link the
"fair use" pics which
contradict the spirit of the GFDL externally. I would love to see the core of
Wikipedia staying free in the sense that you can say to everyone, take the
whole article (text+pics) and do with it whatever you want.
It probably would be simplest to link the "fair use" images externally,
just to make things clearer to the end user.
Otherwise we'd have to say (at the bottom of the page)
"[...] except for any images that may be contained in this page,
whose copyright status is given on their image description pages".
OTOH, if we *don't* start linking these things externally,
then we'd better start writing that!
>As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU
licences
>would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now
>(hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain).
>I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon!
>Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?
The problem is that the GFDL main purpose was for
technical documentation.
This license was never invented for an encyclopedia-like project.
Right, so it's starting to bite us by being applied inappropriately.
It was all that Jimbo had available at the start,
and it's incompatible with being moved over to another licence.
Ultimately, using the GNU licences removes one from
the nonsense of ordinary copyright law to whatever the FSF says.
Someday that will be nonsense too.
Perhaps we can use the "invariant section"
from the GFDL in order to ensure
that quotations are not modified. IMHO this would be sufficent to make quotes
compatible with GFDL.
I don't see how this helps, or would be desirable.
The potential GFDL violation, IIUC, is that somebody could
remove all of our text and gather just quotations together,
publishing these as "The Quotations of Chairman Mao"
(or whoever it was that they gathered the quotations of).
Since this would on longer be fair use, they can't modify our pages freely,
even though they haven't violated your invariant section suggestion.
OTOH, one is certainly free to modify an individual quotation
within one of our pages, say by eliding ("...") an irrelevant clause,
adding back something relevant that was originally elided,
or removing the quotation altogether as unnecessary for the page.
None of this would be allowed if the quotation were an invariant section.
-- Toby