[Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects

Sat May 29 13:59:09 UTC 2004

On 29 May 2004 at 14:09, Ulrich Fuchs wrote:

> It's a pity that we
> can't change the Wikipedia licence any more. We would need something
> that would allow to copy more freely within the wikis, something which
> is more suitable for collaborative writing. However if the content is
> to be taken "outside", authors should be named as indicated by the
> version history.
> 
> Uli

One partial solution is to have contributors grant a license to license under the GFDL. 
We have a modest proposal at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Submission_Standards ...

First, "by contributing to Wikipedia you grant Wikipedia users a perpetual, royalty-free, 
non-exclusive right and license to edit your text on Wikipedia. You agree that your 
submission may be changed, modified, edited, moved, extended, deleted or combined 
by subsequent users of Wikipedia."

Second, "by contributing to Wikipedia, you grant the Wikimedia Foundation a perpetual, 
royalty-free, non-exclusive, right and license to publish your submission, before or after 
being modified as described above, under the GNU Free Documentation License 
(GFDL)."

That doesn't permit free copying of text between wikipedia and its sister projects, but I 
expect addresses some concerns. It's basically how we treat submissions already - a 
formalisation of "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will".

-Martin