Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:
I didn't see it mentioned anywhere, so I post
it anyway.
Last week the Public Library of Science (
www.plos.org) launched their
first Open Acces Journal under the Creative Commons Attribution License
http://www.plosbiology.org
This means (at least in theory) all of this can be reused in the
Wikipedia, including images.
This is something I'd like a lawyer, or at least someone familiar with
copyright law (perhaps Alex?) to clear up: are attribution-style
licenses compatible with the GFDL as used by Wikipedia? My
understanding is that there might be a technical problem, because
attribution-style licenses require attribution of the original author,
while the GFDL only requires attribution of five principal authors. If
there are more than 5 principal authors, the GFDL would permit you to
omit some of them; you could then choose to omit the original author (if
perhaps the original author's relative contribution is now not the major
part of the article), but this would be a violation of the original
attribution license. So it would seem that in some cases at least
attribution-type licenses impose additional requirements above those
imposed by the GFDL, which could be a problem. Not a *major* problem
really, but a technical one that I'm not sure how to solve.
Comments from someone with more knowlege of copyright law? This is
important to resolve, because it's come up several times before (on the
village pump, for example), and there are quite a few attribution-type
licenses that all are fairly similar to each other.
-Mark
The website under discussion uses the least restrictive of the Creative
Commons licenses which requires only attribution to the original author and
a link to a copy of the license. Provided those two requirements are met it
could be used on Wikipedia, however much it had been subsequently modified
under the GFDL. You could never omit the orignal author or the link to the
license unless all the original material had been replaced, rather
unlikely. I believe a simple note at the bottom of the article would
suffice but it would be best if it could be protected so it is not
inadvertently lost by editing.