[Wikipedia-l] Public Library of Science GFDL Compatible

Wed Oct 29 22:45:43 UTC 2003

Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:

>I didn't see it mentioned anywhere, so I post it anyway.
>
>Last week the Public Library of Science (www.plos.org) launched their
>first Open Acces Journal under the Creative Commons Attribution License
>http://www.plosbiology.org
>
>This means (at least in theory) all of this can be reused in the
>Wikipedia, including images.
>  
>
This is something I'd like a lawyer, or at least someone familiar with 
copyright law (perhaps Alex?) to clear up: are attribution-style 
licenses compatible with the GFDL as used by Wikipedia?  My 
understanding is that there might be a technical problem, because 
attribution-style licenses require attribution of the original author, 
while the GFDL only requires attribution of five principal authors.  If 
there are more than 5 principal authors, the GFDL would permit you to 
omit some of them; you could then choose to omit the original author (if 
perhaps the original author's relative contribution is now not the major 
part of the article), but this would be a violation of the original 
attribution license.  So it would seem that in some cases at least 
attribution-type licenses impose additional requirements above those 
imposed by the GFDL, which could be a problem.  Not a *major* problem 
really, but a technical one that I'm not sure how to solve.

Comments from someone with more knowlege of copyright law?  This is 
important to resolve, because it's come up several times before (on the 
village pump, for example), and there are quite a few attribution-type 
licenses that all are fairly similar to each other.

-Mark