[Foundation-l] Only non-commercial re-use od Wiki content?

[Erik Moeller]

Richard-

> Ah, well yes, you're right. On Wikinews (at least en.wikinews) by
> posting you are placing the contents into the public domain...again,
> regardless of any other restrictions you may claim. Right?

When launching Wikinews, we didn't want to settle on an undeniably 
flawed license like the GFDL, nor necessarily commit to the "copyleft" 
principle, before evaluating the ways in which Wikinews content is 
developed and used. The public domain was therefore chosen as the 
initial "license" for Wikinews, as it allows us to migrate to any other 
license relatively painlessly.

We will likely switch to a variant of CC-BY soon (one which requires 
attribution to the wiki, rather than any individual author), which is 
more legally sane than the PD.

Because someone posting someone else's material cannot put it in the 
public domain without the other person's permission, the click-through 
agreement does not apply to such content. The question then becomes, do 
we want to remove CC-BY or CC-BY-SA content posted by others? Given the 
above, I'd say that it's reasonable to label content under CC-BY as such 
and keep it. As for CC-BY-SA, GFDL, etc., the situation is not quite as 
clear, but for the sake of interoperability, I'd be inclined to be in 
favor of allowing such content when labeled. Wikinews stories are 
relatively independent from one another.

If this becomes established practice, it may make sense to amend the 
copyright notice to say ".. is in the public domain where not otherwise 
noted."

Erik