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
What if we ask the FSF if we can consider a different
licence the "sucessor" to the FDL 1.2 for only
wikipedia's purposes. They probably won't do it, but
it's worth a try.
-LDan
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