[Foundation-l] Two questions about the licensing update of media files

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Michael Snow<wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:
[snip]
> I cannot fathom why you would limit media to being released only under
> the GFDL unless it was designed specifically for incorporation into a
> GFDL work. It's a documentation license, not a media license, and when
> applied to radically different contexts it will still be free in the
> dogmatic sense, but it may no longer be all that useful.

Because, unfortunately, representatives of Creative Commons have
asserted that CC-By-Sa licensed media can integrated as a whole
integrated into non-free works, producing a result which is not freely
licensed. In other words— that the cc-by-sa copyleft is nearly moot in
the context of images since they tend to be either incorporated
verbatim or subject to only trivial non-copyright deserving
modifications even when the the resulting work as a whole clearly
builds upon the illustration and isn't merely a collection of separate
things.

The license text itself appears to be reasonably explicit on this
matter—  but I feel it would be unethical to use CC-By-SA when doing
so would cause me to end up litigating against people who were merely
following, in good faith, what they believe to be authoritative
advice.


GFDL licensed images are still perfectly usable in freely licensed
reference works, in spite of the  inconveniences in the license.  It's
unfortunate that there doesn't currently exist an "unclouded" copyleft
license which is well suited for photographs.