[Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects

Mon May 31 10:41:07 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer (maveric149) wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Mav's position, as he is stating it, is more extreme (and simply wrong IMO),
>>since he is claiming (I believe) that a noncopyleft licence like CC-sa
>>is not free to begin with.  

>If CC-sa = Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license, then I think you
>are confused (or at least made a typo).

Yeah, call it a typo.  I had written CC-by-sa (the copyleft one) before,
and then I meant to remove the letters that added the copyleft bit.
This should have left me with CC-by (the free but not copyleft licence),
but I removed the wrong letters.  Sorry about that!

>>So mav can reasonably argue (along with the FSF) that a copyleft licence
>>increases freedom overall, because it enforces freedom for derivative works.
>>But it does not increase the freedom of the ''original'' document --
>>as even the FSF would agree -- and could only decrease ''that'' freedom.

>Decrease that freedom? How when anything from a derivative work can be
>reincorporated back into the original? In what way does that decrease the
>freedom of the original document?

No, ''that'' doesn't decrease the freedom of the document --
it's other effects of the copyleft that do so.

I'll give a specific (albeit still hypothetical) example:

Suppose that there are two free documents that I like,
one of which uses the GNU FDL licence, one of which uses CC-by-sa.
I want to combine these two free documents into a single modified one.
Even though both of them are supposed to be free, I can't do this!
But if either of these documents uses the noncopyleft CC-by instead,
then I am able to do what I want to do with the documents.
The CC-by licence is more free; it gives me more freedoms.

This is not to say that I'm completely out of luck;
CC and GNU are working more closely together,
and Wikimedia may well yet put the pressure on RMS
that's needed to make the GNU FDL compatible with CC-by-sa.
But right now, the fact remains that I have more freedom --
more ability to modify a document that I rightfully possess --
if that document uses the noncopyleft CC-by licence.

That said, it may still be true that the world is more free in the end
if the documents use the copyleft licences -- that all depends
on whether they would be coopted by proprietary writers if they're CC-by.
But the documents themselves are still less free if they're copyleft.

-- Toby