[Wikipedia-l] FDL used to stifle distribution of articles

Sat Nov 29 20:08:18 UTC 2003

A user of the German Wikipedia, Ulrich Fuchs, has threatened to take legal  
action against any third party who makes commercial use of their material  
without following a very narrow interpretation of the FDL "five author"  
requirement, which reads as follows:

"B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities  
responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version,  
together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all  
of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release  
you from this requirement."

Our recommendation for third parties using Wikipedia material so far has  
been that it is completely sufficient in the spirit of the FDL to point to  
the original Wikipedia article on which the copy is based, because that  
page contains the history and therefore the list of *all* authors. Ulrich  
claims that this is not sufficient because it does not meet the conditions  
of modification set forth in the FDL.

This is not just theoretical. There is a new commercial German project  
called "Flexicon" which uses Wikipedia material. Currently they don't give  
any credit whatsoever, but since Flexicon itself is a wiki, some  
Wikipedians have added links to the original Wikipedia articles in order  
to meet the conditions of the FDL. Ulrich now threatens anyone with legal  
action who copies material to Flexicon from the German Wikipedia which he  
has worked on without having the unworkable "list of five principal  
authors" on the target page.

This would place an unacceptable burden on third parties as they would   
have to carry along the complete history of every page thtey use (since  
there is no automated way to determine who is a principal author), a  
history which on the English Wikipedia is now so large that we can't even  
store it in a single file anymore (over 2 gigabytes). Not to mention that  
having such a list in articles is cumbersome and annoying.

In my opinion, legal threats like these are dangerous to this project and  
to the very idea of open content. They also show once again that the FDL  
is a fundamentally flawed, overly complex license with lots of loopholes  
for pedants who want to get their way instead of working with the  
community.

There may be a solution to prevent this problem from escalating. We could  
amend the edit notice on Wikipedia to require the author to release third  
parties from the need to maintain a list of five "principal authors" per  
page, since such a release is explicitly provided for in the FDL..

Regards,

Erik