[Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

[David Goodman]

Fair use applies to material published under GFDL as it does to
material published under any license, or with no license at all, so
one could quote a reasonable amount of GFDL material in an article
under a more restrictive license published in Citizendium.

At the beginning,Citizendium encouraged the use of WP as a starting
point to get some content at all, but has gradually changed the rules
to discouraging it, though not yet forbidding it. The idea seems to be
to encourage the sort of non-fiction academic-oriented writers who
dont really buy into the idea of wikis.

Perhaps Wikipedia should be going in the opposite direction, of
orienting the license to diminish the extent of ownership of
individuals in one's own contributions--one contributes one'ss work
under the understanding that the entire work as a whole be published
as GFDL, but has no remaining right in the individual sentences one
contributes.

On 11/22/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Nov 22, 2007 7:09 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 22/11/2007, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> > > Actually, no. They could retain those articles under GFDL. But have all
> > > others which did not contain text from Wikipedia under some other license.
> > > Consider copyright from the perspective of each article.
> >
> > Yes, that certainly seems to be their intention. It's going to really
> > complicate matters though. GFDL being viral means that any article
> > containing a single sentence from a GFDL article (give or take fair
> > use, I guess) must be entirely under GFDL, so if they start moving
> > articles around and merging them, they're going to end up with a large
> > portion of the site under GFDL.
>
> If they go with a non-GFDL license for non-Wikipedia content, they
> should probably eliminate the Wikipedia-based articles completely.
> It's relatively minor to rewrite the article in your own words if
> you're going to go through and fact-check everything anyway.  Using a
> two-step process where one person extracts the facts (after checking
> the sources) and then a second person writes the article from those
> facts would probably be even easier.  In that sense going with a
> non-GFDL license could actually be an advantage, as it'd encourage
> people to do more than just copy/paste.  (*)
>
> Of course, I think that non-GFDL license should actually be a free
> [TM] one :).  I'm one of those ones who has significantly cut down on
> contributions to Citizendium after hearing rumblings about the license
> possibly not being a free [TM] one.
>
> (*) I guess it could be said that this process could in itself violate
> copyright on the collection of facts, but realistically if you're
> porting to another free [TM] license and you acknowledge Wikipedia as
> a source I don't think anyone would even try to sue, let alone win a
> lawsuit.
>
> (**) I use [TM] next to free because another one of Larry's
> "eccentricities" is that he insists that an NC license is a free
> license.  I think it's obvious what I mean by free, but in case you're
> not sure, see http://freedomdefined.org/, that's essentially my use of
> the term.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.