Imran Ghory wrote:
> The question before us then is this; can we state
on our Wikibooks
> copyright policy page and on every edit page that by pressing
> save, that the submitter is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a
> non-exclusive right to license to use their own unique and
> copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other copyleft
> license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a
> defintion of "copyleft" linked from that word)?
Yes.
The problem I see with this is that it precludes people from cutting
and pasting text from GNU FDL-only sources such as Wikipedia. The
reason is that the person who is pasting it has *no right* to tell us
that we can relicense that text under a different license.
I still think there's some promise in the notion of a disjunctive
license, but I'm still puzzling it out with the authorities.
> Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from
using purely FDL
> work (such as from Wikipedia)?
Yes. The person who is importing the work will not be
able to legally save
the page and meet the required conditions.
Oh, I see Imran says the same as me.
I think this is an insurmountable obstacle for us on this particular
front.
> Related question: If the above is true then could
we add such a notice to
> Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions (we would also have to
> contact every current and past contributor we could in order to ask them
> about the change in copyright terms; if they say no or we can't find them
> their text will only be under the FDL)?
That's right, we could do that, but what a tracking nightmare! Every
article in Wikipedia would have to be flagged somehow.
This *could* conceivably work, though. We could set up software tools
to allow signed-in contributors to click-agree that all of their past
contributions can be flexibly licensed.
But unless we have a *really good* reason, and I don't see that we do,
we shouldn't do this.
--Jimbo