[Foundation-l] deviation from the GFDL in smaller projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
>> One worrying thing that i noticed is that in some of these projects
>> there is no strict adherence to GFDL-only text. Since my first day in
>> Wikipedia i understood how important the GFDL is. I understood that
>> articles cannot be copied verbatim even from sources whose copyright
>> terms allow copying for non-commercial usage, because the "free" in
>> "The Free Encyclopedia" does not refer only to price.
>
> Well, there is even more of that than you describe.
>
> There are projects that are either unable or unvilling to enforce proper
> licencing of images. (Read: many/most images are without any copyright
> templates.)

I intentionally limited my description of the problem to text. Image
fair use is a separate issue.

> There are projects that, despite dedicating significant attention to
> copyright issues, have significant amount of material copied from print
> sources, and thus practically undetectable.

Yes, this exists. I am referring to cases where the projects (not just
single contributors) are aware that the license of the text is not
GFDL.

> This may come as a surprise to Westerners, but most people out there are
> not really aware of copyright. Intelligent, educated adults may have no
> knowledge or understanding of it, and rise a protest when you tell them
> they can't copy text from somewhere.

True: I intentionally wrote "aware that the license of the text is not
GFDL" above, because it is possible that they think that "free as in
beer" is GFDL-compatible.

I would volunteer to approach such projects with an explanation of the
importance of the GFDL, but i am not a lawyer and not an official
representative of WMF. The WMF can tell me to "be bold", but since i
am not talking about cases of singular articles, but whole projects
which apparently have a policy of disregard to GFDL compatibility, i
am quite unsure. The legitimacy of a project may be in question, so i
am reluctant to handle it all by myself.

-- 
Amir Elisha Aharoni

heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore