[WikiEN-l] Re: w to properly use articles from an outside GFDL source?

Fri May 28 10:36:04 UTC 2004

There is another solution to this problem in discussion at Japanese 
Wikipedia and Wiktionary. It is a bit easier than the migration to GNU Free 
Content License, though I would love to see it happen soon.

We may introduce another license - so-called "intra-site public domain 
license" or "intra-wikimedia public domain license." What the license says 
is something like this:

"by contributing to Wikipedia, you allow others to use your contributions 
within Wikipedia's projects as if they are in public domain."

Copying and pasting of GFDL texts are against GFDL in a small way. And it 
happens in many contexts. (Moving Village Pump discussions to appropriate 
talk pages, dividing an article into two pieces, using a boilerplate texts, 
using {{subst:}}, etc.)

It is a bigger concern in Japanese Wikipedia, partly because fair use 
usually have to include attribution according to the Japanese copyright law, 
and because we do not yet have solid evidence to think that substantial 
compliance in spirit is safe enough. In other words, if a troll says, "hey, 
you violated my copyright, because you copied and pasted my contribution 
into another page without following GFDL, and I am going to sue you," that's 
not something we can laugh at.

The introduction of the PD license is also a way to reduce interlingual 
troubles - the required level of compliance at Japanese Wikipedia is a bit 
more strict/ literal than that suggested at en:Wikipedia:Copyright. But some 
English Wikipedians may not know about it, and bring an image or translate 
an article to English Wikipedia from ja. without fulfilling the requirement. 
That, again, is a violation of GFDL, and therefore likely a copyright 
violation.

If we introduce the "intra-wikimedia public domain license," we don't have 
to worry about it.

If English Wikipedia can also introduce similar license, that would make 
things more convenient.

Also, just in case it matters, we would still promote the GFDL-compliant 
preservation of attribution, the purpose is just to reduce the risks from 
legal technicalities, not to trivialize the attribution altogether.

Regards,

Tomos

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