[Foundation-l] Is there a Foundation preferred license?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 11/9/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 11/9/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It depends how you define free. One problem with PD is that it doesn't
> > guarantee the work will remain free, whereas a [[share-alike]] license
> > will.
>
> To be perfectly accurate, the original work will remain freely
> licensed in both cases. Copyleft/share-alike applies to derivatives.

True, but thats immaterial if someone else manages to monopolize
control of the only copies of the original (free) work.

There are a great many public domain audio recordings locked away for
which only copyrighted 'remastered' versions are available.

The same is also true with sheet music. There are some old scores
where the original now public domain orchestrations are nearly
impossible to obtain, and yet you can buy copyrighted versions at any
music store. (Contact the mutopia folks if you don't want to take my
word for it, http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ )

We'd like to think this is less likely to happen in the digital world,
but there is no real evidence that this will be the case.

Although it's easier to copy and preserve a unit of information there
is much more information that needs to be preserved.

Who outside of the employ of Wikimedia has a current copy of all the
commons images? (Jeff? anyone else?) Because we haven't done a dump in
nearly 1 year it's hard to get all of them (must spider).  Who even
has the year old image dump other than me (it's 300gb)?

I don't think it's inconceivable that we could have a serious failure
(chopper flies into datacenter? :) ) which results in some number of
images being lost. At that point, I could take my copies of the
non-copyleft material and make some them unfree through various means.

Also, with the legal enforcement (DMCA) of technological copyright
wrappers it is even conceivable that a PD work can become unfree
without first falling out of circulation. Is a work free if it can
only be redistributed after someone has been brought up on criminal
charges and jailed for removing it from its wrapper?

The first point I made is real and is already happening, it wouldn't
be unfair to call it common.. the second point depends a little on
speculation regarding the willingness of the courts to enforce DMCA
like laws in violation of we would consider common sense, but the
current trends are not positive.

So I think it's clear that copylefts have merit even without
considering derivative works.

It might be interesting if a half-copyleft existed, whereby you could
create non-free derivative works but you always had to include a copy
or an offer to provide a copy of the original free work under its
original free license.  This would close my concerns about
non-copyleft content being locked up without taking the step of
encumbering derivatives which is opposed by some (generally people who
advocate "PD" on Wikimedia projects, or people who advocate BSD
licenses in the software world).

That said, there is already enough lack of clarity.. and the last
thing the world needs is another license or, worse, another confusing
CC-foobar modifier.