[Foundation-l] Wikinews licensing

Erik Moeller erik_moeller at gmx.de
Thu Oct 28 11:57:00 UTC 2004


NSK-
>> (my personal favorite, the public domain, has relatively little support).

> I am very interested in learning more about your reasoning on public domain
> and why it's your favourite. If you have enough time, please give me some
> reasons why a site admin should allow wikiauthors to choose public domain
> for their contributions. If you wanted to make me support PD, what would you
> tell me?

Two reasons:
1) It's compatible with everything. Never, ever worry about this crap  
again. Ask yourself if you realistically want to go after "infringers".

2) Copyleft requires enforcement, i.e. coercion. I believe this sends the  
wrong message, is a bad long-term strategy, and does not reflect well on  
our movement. As an opponent of copyright law, I also don't want to give  
people the argument that copyleft needs copyright to work.

That said, the differences are often exaggerated, so I don't lead personal  
crusades about the issue.

If you want a detailed discussion, you should talk to Jamesday on  
irc.freenode.net.

Regards,

Erik



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