[Commons-l] Fwd: Share-Alike with images

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 2/10/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> We've always held that GFDL combined with other pictures and media are
> "mere aggregations", so it may be in our interest not to advocate a
> strict interpretation of existing licenses. But it doesn't seem at all
> unreasonable to me to desire stronger copyleft protection for works
> which are, in their nature, unlikely to be significantly modified
> directly.

To be fair, ... we've held that in part because we have depended on
it, and because at one time we didn't understand the importance of
non-textual illustration as we do today... Not necessarily so much
because it made sense or because was good policy.  Certainly there are
cases where it really is mere aggregation, but by no means are all.
In some cases, that the result is a derivative is beneficial under US
law at least.

For a long time, enwiki required that all free images uploaded be at
least dual licensed with the GFDL, but this requirement was
accidentally lost in upload page refactorings more times than I can
count... eventually people gave up because figuring out which images
were and were not submitted with that requirement became impossible
and the lack of a similar requirement on commons made the matter moot.
 Had I known then what I know now, I would have fought for different
requirements.  Live and learn.

There have been plenty of cases where I created images while working
with a Wikipedia article and enhanced the text of a Wikipedia article
around an illustration. The end result being neither the image nor the
article could have existed in its final state without the other. This
would probably meet the most stringent criteria for a derivative which
you could invent. While only minority of our cases are that clear cut,
there are many more which could easily be classified as derivative
under any one of many sensible definitions such as your semantic
relation criteria.