On 6/11/07, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
On 6/11/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So, I should print it out, frame it nicely, then
glue the GFDL to the
bottom of the frame before hanging it on my wall? Imagine there's a
world outside of cyberspace....
If you hang it on your wall at home, you don't have to add anything to
it. If you /redistribute/ it, then you have to give the license.
Though strictly not legal, I doubt anyone will come after you if you
settle for license name and link in the image credits. If you're going
to mass-print GFDL-based picture catalogs, you'll probably have a page
ot two for the license anyway :-)
So, in other words, I have to break the law.
This is what it says on the Wikipedia page about the license:
Burdens when printing
The GNU FDL requires that licensees, when printing a document covered
by the license, must also include "this License, the copyright
notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the
Document". This means that if a licensee prints out a copy of an
article whose text is covered under the GNU FDL, he or she must also
include a copyright notice and a physical printout of the GNU FDL,
which is a significantly large document in itself.
What I really do is just what everyone else does,
ignore all the
images with GFDL and search for ones with Public Domain releases.
So you personally know "everyone else"? Or do you have any usage statistics?
I personally know people I work with who deal with the issue of using
images, and other editors on Wikipedia whom I've asked about this.
All have offered the same solution: search for Public Domain images.
As to statistics once you've asked for the 6+billion, sampling the
population just won't do.
I'm an artist, so don't try telling me I
can just download someon
else's image and not comply with the licensing agreement, but it's
absurd to allow one to be used that simply can't be used--and, again,
imagine a world where images are used for things other than cyberspace
communities.
Do you have a real-life example where it is impossible for you to
comply with the license?
Impossible? The same example I gave, a 4" square image accompanied by
a couple of pages of text. Impossible? I'm a starving artist, I can
afford to frame a 4" square image, but can't afford the 24" by 24"
frame, paper and matboard for the accompanying text.
The whole image world on Wikipedia and
escpecially Wikimedia Commons
is so difficult and poorly thought out in so many ways that I seldom
bother uploading images. Things like this, the common usage of a
license which, if anyone ever read it, simply could not be understood
to apply to images, is just one of many frustrating issues.
Licensing images under GFDL was a neccessity in the beginning, as it
was the only copyleft license for non-software documents available at
the time. I think its use as the only image license will decline.
Personally, I dual-license all my files on commons GFDL and
CC-BY-SA-2.5, to give the user the maximum of choices.
Magnus
Please don't tell people to simply violate artistic copyright.
KP