[Commons-l] Dual-Licensing Commons

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 2/9/07, nilfanion wiki <nilfanion at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I had a random thought today and think it is worth a cursory consideration.
> Would it be (1) desirable, (2) technically feasible and (3) legal to
> relicense Commons under a dual GFDL / Creative Commons license as opposed to
> the current GFDL state?
>
> I don't no strong feelings about this, but I feel it is worthy of a
> discussion. If it IS possible and legal (I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if
> it is possible or not), I think there might be beneficial effects of it. For
> example, imagine the following scenario:
>
> An image is uploaded to Commons as CC-by-sa-2.5. A third party then makes
> use of the image, under the terms of the CC license. In addition to the
> image, they copy the description on the Image: page to use as their caption.
> As the text of the page is licensed under the GFDL, would this downstream
> user have violated the GFDL?
>
> If the answer to this question is yes, then there could be significant
> benefits to a dual-licensing of Commons itself. If this went anywhere, I'd
> imagine the final decision would be made by the Foundation, but the
> community ought to think it over first...
>
> What do people think? (If its daft, don't hold your punches I don't mind)

/me punches
*WHAM*   :)

I think the biggest reason that this wouldn't be a huge point would be
because most image pages should not be substantial enough to be
copyright deserving.

In whatever cases they are, they probably have copied wikipedia
text... which would complicate things.

Any finally, I'm not all that convinced that an additional complex
license for the image page would make a lot of sense.  I'm no fan of
creating additional market place confusion by promoting the Creative
Commons any more than we must, ... if we really have cause to think
the license of image pages is a problem for folks we should request
instead that people release their image page edits into something
effectively equal to the public domain.