[Textbook-l] legal counsel on copyright issues

[Daniel Mayer]

Toby wrote:
>...
>If a textbook project that wants to use material 
>from Wikipedia, then it can make a decision that 
>it wants this material more than the mere 
>possibility of material under some other licence.

And where exactly is the material from this other
license at? That type of long term planning is also
really bizarre in the wiki world - where are the
crystal balls we should use in order to find out what
license this magical text will be under? However, what
we have /right now/ is a HUGE open content resource
that will almost certainly be ENORMOUS in a couple
years. This is a prediction we can bank on. 

>If you have a specific use in mind for a large 
>chunk of text, then this shouldn't be a very 
>difficult choice to make! 

Yep - use Wikipedia and public domain text as your
primary resources (it is gotten us this far!). I still
would like to know of /any/ other body of open content
text at all comparable to Wikipedia that we could use
for textbooks. Mixing and matching licenses will
prevent the free exchange of text to and from
Wikipedia and most madenly from between our textbooks!
It is best to work with what we have right now and
continually work with the copyleft viral license
makers to make their licenses compatible with each
other. 

PLEASE let's not fork the project before it even
starts. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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