[Textbook-l] legal counsel on copyright issues

[Daniel Mayer]

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Karl Wick wrote:
>> Now there's a thought ... what if each textbook project
>> decides for itself depending on its own estimation of its 
>> needs?  If a project decides wrongly, then only it has to 
>> start over. Sitewide policy can be submitted to the public 
>> domain, or kept under GFDL for copying from Wikipedia.
>
>I think that it would be very unpractical. Keeping everything 
>GFDL makes us bidirectionally compatibe with Wikipedia. 
>Changing license to something else breaks that link.

I tend to agree. IMO the most practical thing for us to do is to have 
everything under the GNU FDL. This will make it very easy to use the vast 
amounts of material already in Wikipedia (which is, by far, the largest open 
content project in the world - please correct me if I am wrong anybody). 

However, I also think it would be a great long term strategy to work with the 
GNU, Creative Commons, Open Content and others who publish copyleft/open 
content/viral licenses to ensure direct compatibility. IMO it is real stupid 
and counter to the intent of these licenses that text cannot flow freely 
between them. There should be some baseline of "freedom" that all these 
licenses already have and will recognize for the purposes of transferability. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)