Jimmy Wales wrote in part:
I've been chatting with Larry Lessig about
copyright and license
issues, and of course he's a big proponent of his own Creative Commons
licenses.
I agree, Creative Commons is just better.
And they have cool videos! ^_^
Actually, what I think we should do, from the outset,
is dual-license
everything under both licenses. That ensures that the text is
compatible with Wikipedia.
That's not a bad idea in any case,
to allow compatibility with some other GFDL project.
It's a bit late for Wikipedia proper to do much
good with dual licensing,
but for textbooks, it might be a good idea to do it from the outset.
How long until all text on Wikipedia is completely rewritten? 5 years? 10?
Everything that /I/ write on Wikipedia
is automatically free with /no/ restrictions,
because /everything/ that I write is free with no restrictions.
To be sure, such lack of restrictions applies only
insofar as what I've written is /new/ --
otherwise, the rest is still copyright as before,
and that material is licensed only under the GFDL.
But can it work to require people to dual license their submissions,
so long as the Creative Commons licence specifically applies
/only/ to the material that's new?
(For any given submission, that may be nothing, or everything.)
Does such an idea fit into copyright law at all?
-- Toby