[WikiEN-l] GFDL and images

[Fastfission]

GFDL is at the very best a confusing and not very good license for images.
At worst it is positively prohibitive -- unless you are publishing a large
work as GFDL it is not a good license, and unfortunately most potential
usages of Wikipedia images other than complete ports of Wikipedia don't work
that way.

But this is not news -- people have been advocating using CC-SA-BY for
images for a long time, as it doesn't require stapling an entire copy of a
license to reproduce it in, say, a newspaper or something like that. You
just need to indicate what the license is and maybe provide a URL. Good
enough for me.

Personally I always license mine a CC-SA-BY (always attributing to Commons,
not myself personally) and then include the additional clause that if
someone is using it for educational purposes they can use it without any
conditions at all (basically PD-self). As a result my diagrams get pretty
good representation in course lectures and handouts, which I find pretty
flattering! I also always encourage those who want to use them in somewhat
different licensing arrangements to contact me for other arrangements, and
have gotten about a half-dozen requests to have my images in books and
handouts and other sorts of arrangements -- again pretty flattering! And
well, well within the spirit of the free content movement. And always
linking back to Commons.

FF

On 6/10/07, K P <kpbotany at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Would someone please explain to me (I've asked before, so I'm pretty
> sure no one can/will, and it won't matter) how the GNU Free
> Documentation License can possibly apply to images?  It seems that, by
> the words of the license, you have to modify the image itself to
> conform to the license, because none of the images have the copyright
> attached to them.  Then, once you've attacked the copyright notice,
> why the hell would you want to use the image, other than to
> demonstrate how it can't possibly be applied to images, in which case
> images uploaded under GNUFDLBLAHBLAHBLAH are completely worthless,
> because no one else can ever use them except under limited and
> crippling conditions.
>
>
> 2. VERBATIM COPYING
> You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either
> commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the
> copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies
> to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no
> other conditions whatsoever to those of this License.
>
> So, you copy a tiny image of the Internet and you have to add 3 pages
> of licensing text?  That's BS.  It means essentially that for all the
> uploaders generosity in uploading the image it can't be used by anyone
> else because it can't meet the requirements of the license because
> meeting the requirements would destroy the usability of the image:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sweetbay1082.jpg
>
> Why are images uploaded under a license that obviously doesn't apply to
> images?
>
> Is this one of those cases where I should know to just ignore the
> title and the words because they mean something else, in which case
> the license is meaningless....
>
> KP
>
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