I had a random thought today and think it is worth a cursory consideration. Would it be (1) desirable, (2) technically feasible and (3) legal to relicense Commons under a dual GFDL / Creative Commons license as opposed to the current GFDL state?
I don't no strong feelings about this, but I feel it is worthy of a discussion. If it IS possible and legal (I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if it is possible or not), I think there might be beneficial effects of it. For example, imagine the following scenario:
An image is uploaded to Commons as CC-by-sa-2.5. A third party then makes use of the image, under the terms of the CC license. In addition to the image, they copy the description on the Image: page to use as their caption. As the text of the page is licensed under the GFDL, would this downstream user have violated the GFDL?
If the answer to this question is yes, then there could be significant benefits to a dual-licensing of Commons itself. If this went anywhere, I'd imagine the final decision would be made by the Foundation, but the community ought to think it over first...
What do people think? (If its daft, don't hold your punches I don't mind)
Nilfanion
Totally relicensing Commons would be impossible: it would require consent of all current and past contributors. For me personally, I think copyleft is evil, and have all my text contributions multi licensed with the CC-BY-2.5.
Bryan
On 2/9/07, nilfanion wiki [email protected] wrote:
I had a random thought today and think it is worth a cursory consideration. Would it be (1) desirable, (2) technically feasible and (3) legal to relicense Commons under a dual GFDL / Creative Commons license as opposed to the current GFDL state?
I don't no strong feelings about this, but I feel it is worthy of a discussion. If it IS possible and legal (I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if it is possible or not), I think there might be beneficial effects of it. For example, imagine the following scenario:
An image is uploaded to Commons as CC-by-sa-2.5. A third party then makes use of the image, under the terms of the CC license. In addition to the image, they copy the description on the Image: page to use as their caption. As the text of the page is licensed under the GFDL, would this downstream user have violated the GFDL?
If the answer to this question is yes, then there could be significant benefits to a dual-licensing of Commons itself. If this went anywhere, I'd imagine the final decision would be made by the Foundation, but the community ought to think it over first...
What do people think? (If its daft, don't hold your punches I don't mind)
Nilfanion _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 2/9/07, nilfanion wiki [email protected] wrote:
I had a random thought today and think it is worth a cursory consideration. Would it be (1) desirable, (2) technically feasible and (3) legal to relicense Commons under a dual GFDL / Creative Commons license as opposed to the current GFDL state?
I don't no strong feelings about this, but I feel it is worthy of a discussion. If it IS possible and legal (I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if it is possible or not), I think there might be beneficial effects of it. For example, imagine the following scenario:
An image is uploaded to Commons as CC-by-sa-2.5. A third party then makes use of the image, under the terms of the CC license. In addition to the image, they copy the description on the Image: page to use as their caption. As the text of the page is licensed under the GFDL, would this downstream user have violated the GFDL?
If the answer to this question is yes, then there could be significant benefits to a dual-licensing of Commons itself. If this went anywhere, I'd imagine the final decision would be made by the Foundation, but the community ought to think it over first...
What do people think? (If its daft, don't hold your punches I don't mind)
/me punches *WHAM* :)
I think the biggest reason that this wouldn't be a huge point would be because most image pages should not be substantial enough to be copyright deserving.
In whatever cases they are, they probably have copied wikipedia text... which would complicate things.
Any finally, I'm not all that convinced that an additional complex license for the image page would make a lot of sense. I'm no fan of creating additional market place confusion by promoting the Creative Commons any more than we must, ... if we really have cause to think the license of image pages is a problem for folks we should request instead that people release their image page edits into something effectively equal to the public domain.
On 10/02/07, nilfanion wiki [email protected] wrote:
I had a random thought today and think it is worth a cursory consideration. Would it be (1) desirable, (2) technically feasible and (3) legal to relicense Commons under a dual GFDL / Creative Commons license as opposed to the current GFDL state?
I agree it would be painful to pursue this. (ie painful enough not to bother)
An image is uploaded to Commons as CC-by-sa-2.5. A third party then makes use of the image, under the terms of the CC license. In addition to the image, they copy the description on the Image: page to use as their caption. As the text of the page is licensed under the GFDL, would this downstream user have violated the GFDL?
Hmmm I never considered Image: pages like that. I hope it is not true. As far as I'm concerned, Image: pages are just like meta-data and shouldn't contain any text that is too copyrightable. (Do we care about our Template:Information or license templates? I doubt it.) So what's left - the uploader's description, in some cases that's nothing, in a few cases it might be a thoughtful paragraph. The edit box says 'you agree to submit this text under the GFDL' but Special:Upload doesn't.
OK let's see... if you did copy the caption and didn't credit it as GFDL, who would be able to claim their copyright was violated? That would be anyone who edited the image page, in most cases only the uploader (I doubt the re-user would copy the categories, so maintenance work probably wouldn't matter anyway). [Note: not Wikimedia Commons, or WMF.] Now they (uploaders) are submitting their work under a free license. They write a description not as a creative effort but as a basic descriptive effort that accompanies the media. Are they really like to consider their rights violated and WANT to prosecute anything? It seems extremely unlikely to me.
So I think 1) it won't ever be a real issue, and 2) It would be good if we could change the GFDL to only apply to non-Image: pages, and make all Image: contents PD as Greg mentions. Definitely too difficult to do retroactively, but might be possible from a certain date in the future, if we thought it was worth pursuing.
Anyway interesting question, these are always worth pursuing.
cheers Brianna user:pfctdayelise
nilfanion wiki wrote:
An image is uploaded to Commons as CC-by-sa-2.5. A third party then makes use of the image, under the terms of the CC license. In addition to the image, they copy the description on the Image: page to use as their caption. As the text of the page is licensed under the GFDL, would this downstream user have violated the GFDL?
The content of image-pages is probably ineligible. Were it a rich description about the place? it should be on wikipedia, not in commons :P
Anyway, setting on the license notice "and dual license your image description under GFDL and the image license" could be ok. But what to do then with image page edits? The change of that user about the description... and if it's GFDL, should the history of no source, deletion requested, not copyvio appear?