[WikiEN-l] Possible copyright violation of Wikipedia content by Infoslurp.com

Wed Feb 9 18:23:01 UTC 2005

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>My understanding of the GFDL is that it means you could even stand on a
>street corner and sell bound copies of its content for a fee.  Someone
>will undoubtedly correct me if this is wrong.  Free as in speech, not free
>as in beer.
>  
>
Yep.  In fact, the Free Software Foundation, which drafted the GFDL, is 
pretty adamant about the right to sell commercially being part of the 
freedom involved in capital-F Free.  The only thing you're required to 
do is license any changes you make under the same license, and provide a 
"transparent" (i.e. machine-readable and human-editable) copy of the 
document.  In fact, if some enterprising company were to look at 
Wikipedia, sort through the articles for 10,000 good ones, copyedit and 
clean those up, and then bind it in a nice set of volumes, that'd be 
perfectly within both the letter and the spirit of the GFDL, as long as 
they allowed us to reuse their copyedits and other changes in our own 
version.

-Mark