Hi everyone,

Recently I have been engaging on this list in rather technical arguments about what the FDL allows and doesn't allow. To be honest I have come to the conclusion that the FDL is rather vague and difficult to apply precisely. But then I suppose all such licenses are like that -- there are just too many possibilities to be able to deal with them all.

Of course, in the Real World(tm) people work out what the license really means through lawsuits. But we should all hope we need never resort to that. And AFAIK, there has never been a single case involving the GFDL or GPL. Most people are good and obey the license (more or less); the few that don't can generally be talked out of it or presured by the community into compliance.

(And I think that, if anyone ever did violate the FDL in respect of Wikipedia, and we tried to enforce it through the courts, we might run into legal difficulties anyway. I suspect it is much harder to prosecute copyright infringement when the holders of the copyright are an amorphous mass of people, many anonymous, rather only one or a few clearly identifiable individuals.)

Which is why I propose we forget about the precise legal details of the FDL. Since the FDL is enforced through means of social pressure rather than legal proceeding, its spirit is more important than its letter. So lets just put the precise requirements of the FDL aside, and just concentrate on what would be the best solution.

I also think we need to be flexible here. We should decide on acknowledgement criteria now, but we should be open to changing the criteria in the future. Otherwise we might decide on something that seems good now, but turns out later on to be very bad, and be stuck with it. Any future adjustments should be decided upon by the general consensus of the Wikipedia community. Of course, changing acknowledgment criteria like that might not fit with the letter of the FDL and copyright law, but as I said above its the spirit, not the letter, of the FDL that really counts. (And as to copyright law, as I said it is difficult to apply it to Wikipedia -- copyright law isn't designed to handle largely anonymous, free, community products. It doesn't IMHO work too well for things like GNU or Linux, and it is sure to work even less for Wikipedia. Open source and open content tries to build itself upon copyright law, but there is no natural fit between them -- they are based on fundamentally different concepts.)

Finally, I think people are overestimating the likelihood of Yahoo or MSN or so on putting up their own variants of Wikipedia without acknowledging. They wouldn't do this for several reasons: (1) even if they might in theory get away with it, their lawyers would tell them to be cautious; (2) coming from largely copyright-centred corporate cultures (almost everything they own is IP), they probably will need encouragement to use Wikipedia at all, not discouragement from using it incorrectly; (3) even if they did, i'm sure the community (not just us, i'm sure we'd see slashdot and then wired and other media reporting on it) would pounce on them if they insisted on using it without acknowledgement.

Simon J Kissane

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