[Foundation-l] Legal position of audio recordings of GFDL content?

[geni]

On 22/04/2008, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> One important question: how do you manage GFDL on spoken text? To the
>  satisfaction of, e.g., querulous Commons admins who deal with
>  licensing stupidities all the time? (Geni, I'm looking at you ;-) )

You can't but assuming you are dealing with more normal people there
are ways to do it.

>  Requiring a reading of the license on the end of all audios is
>  onerous. Our many spoken articles on English Wikipedia are
>  (presumably) not a violation as long as they're on Wikipedia, with the
>  license text a link away - but aren't really unencumbered for use
>  elsewhere.

Not the problem you might think. Obviously it will limit the formats
you can use. 45s and 78s are going to be basically unusable and 33s
would be fairly borderline.

For CDs it is less of a problem. You have a single track dedicated to
the legal stuff and everything else just as normal. If you want to put
multiple articles onto a single CD then it would probably a be a good
idea to take the approach of merging them into a single document. If
you make a CD that is say a series of spoken versions of our US
president articles then you are going to run into problems with the
size of the article history but by using synthesised speech and
dumping the lot on a separate CD it should be doable.

In the end it's just another version of the old overhead problem that
means the GFDL is useless for postcards as well.

Invariant sections can of course case massive problems. If an
invariant section is an image you are basically stuffed.

>Is the GFDL fundamentally discriminatory against the blind?

No more than many EULAs


>This in itself IMO is a strong case for porting to CC-by-sa.

Still runs into issues when faced with large numbers of authors. "keep
intact all copyright notices for the Work" has the same problem with
invariant sections as the GFDL.

-- 
geni