[Wikilegal-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Public Library of Science GFDL Compatible

Fri Oct 31 07:59:30 UTC 2003

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:

> If I am not mistaken, the important part of CC licenses is that they are not
> necessarily viral.
>
> For example, CC-by (aka CC-Attribution license) allows the authors of
> derivative works to change the license terms, as I understand. If you modify
> the work, you should still make an attribution. But you do not have to
> license that derivative work you created under the same (CC-By) license. You
> can fully copyright it, or you can release it under GFDL.
>
> CC-by-sa (CC-Attribution-Share Alike)  is a different story. That is viral
> and requires derivative works to be released under the same licenese. This,
> I think is clear when one compares two license terms, especially the part
> 4-b.
> And here are the links:
>
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/legalcode
>
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/legalcode
>
> Sorry if I am mistaken. But if I'm right, you can create some derivative
> work first, and you can release it under GFDL. I hope someone else can
> double check the legal code on this point.

Hmmm... Actually you may be right there - given that there is a version of
the CC license which specifically states that derivative works must be under
the same license, it seems reasonable to assume that without this provision
this is NOT the case. Which in turn means that we can indeed use it in
Wikipedia - editing and merging with other material would clearly make it a
derivative work.

Even original works under CC-license (basic license and attribute license
only) could be put in Wikipedia that way - the work would be spread by
Wikipedia under the CC license 'for the time being', and then 'automatically'
revert to GNU/FDL once significant edits have been made.

Andre Engels