[Commons-l] Problems with derivative works

[Fastfission]

On 10/24/07, Nilfanion <nilfanion at googlemail.com> wrote:
> It is easy to fix one image, but I suspect we have deeper problems
> throughout the project with a lack of respect for copyleft.
> Establishing just how serious this issue is will be non-trivial, never
> mind resolving it.

It's one of the downsides of allowing so many incompatible copyleft
licenses -- if you really want to be scrupulous you have to create
crazy licensing schemes on the derivative images. This is one of the
reasons people should be encouraged to multi-license (GFDL/CC/etc.) --
otherwise you end up with competing flavors of copyleft that are not
compatible and are in the end no great increase in freedom.

I've thought for a long time that we should have a category of generic
copyleft license that basically said that the WMF could add additional
licenses to that category over time as long as they met a few basic
requirements. So I would license an image as "Generic WMF-approved
copyleft" and the license itself would say that GFDL and CC-BY-SA were
currently included in that, but if in the future SuperCopyLeftLicense
was developed then the WMF could deliberate and decide if it was
included as well, and this could apply retroactively (in the same way
that the FSF can update the GFDL as they see fit). To me that would
seem like the perfect way to encourage interchangability over the long
and short terms (will the GFDL be used for anything but
Wikimedia-related projects in the next ten years? Was it really the
best license to commit to? Why commit to any one license, why not
leave it open just enough to allow evolution but constrained in such a
way to make abuse unlikely?).

But nobody seems that enthusiastic about the idea but me. Oh well. :-(

FF