[Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

Wed Dec 8 06:34:22 UTC 2004

Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a license incompatible with all of their existing licenses. That rules out any likely form of copyleft if the project is to achieve its major goal, though with sufficient studying of all of the contracts news publishers have with their new sources I suppose it's conceivable that some form of copyleft license could be written to be incompatible with a small enough set of them for small publishers to use stories.

Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de>
To: Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com>, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 13:22:13 +0100
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

Robin Shannon wrote:
> Well i have contributed 2 articles to wikinews so far, and one of them
> i lifted (more or less) straight from wikipedia (from an article that
> was written about 5 minutes before i sat down to write). I can think
> that there would be plenty of times when lifting a paragraph or so
> from wikipedia would be useful in wikinews. Hence while i would like
> it to be PD, i think that GFDL (provided that becomes CC-BY-SA
> complient sometime) would be the most practical.

Yesterday, ddp, a medium sized news agency copied [[de:Misshandlung]] 
from wikipedia 1:1 and sent it over their channel. They didn't even try 
to stick to the GNU FDL and it took me some time to explain copyright to 
them.

I will not participate in a PD wikinews that does not ensure that free 
text remains free. CC-BY-SA does not block newspapers from using the 
content and because of the <buzzword>synergy</buzzword> hopes regarding 
wikipedia, i suggest a dual licensing of GFDL and CC-BY-SA (keeping in 
mind that these two should merge some day...)

Mathias

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