[Wikipedia-l] FDL used to stifle distribution of articles
Erik Moeller
erik_moeller at gmx.de
Sat Nov 29 20:08:18 UTC 2003
A user of the German Wikipedia, Ulrich Fuchs, has threatened to take legal
action against any third party who makes commercial use of their material
without following a very narrow interpretation of the FDL "five author"
requirement, which reads as follows:
"B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version,
together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all
of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release
you from this requirement."
Our recommendation for third parties using Wikipedia material so far has
been that it is completely sufficient in the spirit of the FDL to point to
the original Wikipedia article on which the copy is based, because that
page contains the history and therefore the list of *all* authors. Ulrich
claims that this is not sufficient because it does not meet the conditions
of modification set forth in the FDL.
This is not just theoretical. There is a new commercial German project
called "Flexicon" which uses Wikipedia material. Currently they don't give
any credit whatsoever, but since Flexicon itself is a wiki, some
Wikipedians have added links to the original Wikipedia articles in order
to meet the conditions of the FDL. Ulrich now threatens anyone with legal
action who copies material to Flexicon from the German Wikipedia which he
has worked on without having the unworkable "list of five principal
authors" on the target page.
This would place an unacceptable burden on third parties as they would
have to carry along the complete history of every page thtey use (since
there is no automated way to determine who is a principal author), a
history which on the English Wikipedia is now so large that we can't even
store it in a single file anymore (over 2 gigabytes). Not to mention that
having such a list in articles is cumbersome and annoying.
In my opinion, legal threats like these are dangerous to this project and
to the very idea of open content. They also show once again that the FDL
is a fundamentally flawed, overly complex license with lots of loopholes
for pedants who want to get their way instead of working with the
community.
There may be a solution to prevent this problem from escalating. We could
amend the edit notice on Wikipedia to require the author to release third
parties from the need to maintain a list of five "principal authors" per
page, since such a release is explicitly provided for in the FDL..
Regards,
Erik
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