Jimbo announced the intent to move from the GFDL to a new version of GFDL that was cross-compatible with the Creative Commons Cc-By-SA license.

I'm not going to pretend that I understand the implications of all of this. GFDL, admittedly, was never a particularly good fit for a Wiki. Compatibility between GFDL and CC has been a long-term goal for FSF and CC, however, how this affects Wikipedia is unclear. There are murmurings about a "community process" to change the licensing, but of course no amount of community process can change the licensing of the gigabyes of material that tens of thousands of authors have thus far created. Even amending the GFDL doesn't solve the problem, as the works are licensed under the GFDL that was in place at the time of their creation.

I suspect that the "finesse" will be to ignore the explicit rights to the copyright holders of all those fragementary diffs, but this will set an interesting precedent.

You cannot simply change the license without getting the permission of every single rights-holder or you are violating their copyright, which they have not ceded unless they have explicitly said so.

God, how does Mike Godwin sleep nights with these nuts doing all of these crazy things? This is a legal nightmare.

IANAL, but section 10 of the GFDL does say "If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation." [[Mediawiki:Copyrightwarning]], [[Mediawiki:Edittools]], and [[Mediawiki:Uploadtext]] contain the site's licensing notices; if those messages ever specified a particular version of the GFDL that would be nightmarish, but I don't think they did.

It's at least heavily implied that they use 1.2.

Indeed. Further, as far as I can tell there never is/was a way to explicitly choose exactly, and only, 1.2 at any time in the past. For example, click on "upload file" and "your own work" and peruse the list of licensing options, and contrast the GFDL to the CC licenses. If there was no choice given to the author, can it be argued the material must be considered the version given by the WMF (1.2)? If not, then what is to stop a chain of argument that begins with the GFDL and ends with outright transfer of ownership from author to publisher, using "or any later version" as the logical connective?

Publisher-proposed/imposed changes to the license are almost never in the interest of the author. Not too surprised at Wales and company -- very surprised the FSF went along with this.

Your right about the need for universal consent. CC will require better attribution (not just fav 5, but all contributors.) But still you can argue that if you give a license that does not require attribution and it is replaced with one that requires attribution you get information that is "less free" and your intent as a contributor has been frustrated.

The GFDL was a mistake. It was not well suited and has a lot of lugggage that pertained to software not an encyclopedia. The CC license is lean, parsimonious and straight forward. Stallman of GNU is a doctrinaire jerk and difficult to work with.

Don't you guys want to watch the actual pomp and celebrity of the license announcement?



Apparently the license adjustment was a more important event to the FSF guy (Larry Lessig) than his high school graduation, his wedding day, or even the day he first got action with a girl.

P.S. Jimbo actually invited me to this party, via Facebook. I couldn't throw together airfare and hotel in time. It was my daughter's birthday yesterday, besides.

P.P.S. How dorky is the guy yelling out, "You nailed it!"?

Greg

I don't care what they claim: you cannot legally get people to change the license under which they allow you to use their copyright material without getting a new agreement out of them.

The only way to do this would have been to ask for a cession of copyright. Most people who edit Wikipedia would have done this anyway, but you can't go back after the fact and change the agreement under which the information was released in the first place.

That said, I'm jealous. Jimbo invited Greg to a party? Did he invite JzG? Did he invite SV? No, he invites Greg...

JzG must be spitting bullets about now....

Once or twice a year Jimbo launches yet another one of his lead balloons full of hot air across the WikiΦairgrounds. Anyone who has seen this show a couple of times before will recognize it for the diversionary performance that it really is — in this case most likely designed to distract attention from the fact that Wikipedia can scarcely bring itself to honor the most minimal obligations of the Gnu Free Doc License that it already pretends to be working under. There is no chance that Wikipedia can sweep its content under a different copyright rug at this stage of the game — NONE — and he knows it.

Jon Awbrey

It's my understanding that the claim of 'Wikipedia is switching to CC-BY-SA' is misleading. The GFDL is being updated to be closer and more compatible with CC-BY-SA, then Wikipedia is updating to that version. The key is that you agree to contribute your contributions under the GFDL "or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation". Theoretically, the FSF could change the GFDL license to be the following:

"I agree to allow anyone to use my work in any way they see fit, as long as they include the phrase "I love the cock" somewhere in the work."

And anyone could then use your work as long as they included the words "I love the cock", whatever the GFDL may have been when you wrote your article be damned.

I think I see SV's dog in the audience.

I think this is huge.

An army of volunteers generated the content of Wikipedia with the understanding that it would be licensed in a certain way. Wikipedia reneged on the deal. It didn't even go ten years.

There's no reason to believe that the rules won't be changed again and again. The Foundation thinks that the content belongs to Wikipedia, and is theirs to do what they want with. Unless it's a liability. Then the content belongs to the individual who donated, er, licensed it.

If they want to start an encyclopedia under a different license then the right thing to do would be to start from scratch, not find a ridiculous technicality and then completely change what the license is about.

The same goes if they want to get rid of "anyone can edit". Start a new project, if you think it will be better.

The volunteers who built Wikipedia and placed their trust in the management there should know that they have been betrayed.

It's not really a "ridiculous technicality"; the license, from the start, had a clause allowing updates to new versions of the license if passed by the GNU people.

In order to accept the representations of Wikipedia, one has to believe that the contemplated model is a sustainable practice.

There is now enough empirical evidence to demonstrate that the system, as delivered, diverges from a sustainable model.

Wikipedia must adapt or crumble of its own inherent dysfunctionality.

But adaptation and evolution to a sustainable model would likely require a fundamental redesign of the system architecture.

The myth that was Wikipedia must go the way of all myths, and be supplanted by scientifically sound architectural principles.

Look, it doesn't really matter what particular Rag Of A Flag these WikiPirates are flying on a given day — a Liberian flag, a Nigerian flag, or the Jolly Jimbo itself — b-e-c-a-u-s-e …

They're Pirates !!!

They don't really honor any flag, GFDL, CC-By-SA, Whatever …

Jonny

Has anyone designed the "Jolly Jimbo" yet? Do they carry them at the "Durova for ArbCom!" store?

Several things bear mentioning:

1) The ability to choose any extant version of the GFDL accrues to the licensee. Wikipedia is, in essence, the creator of a derivative (compilation) work with its own copyright, but any given article is copyrighted by its myriad of authors, and licensed by whomever copies the article to use elsewhere. The copier may choose any license under which to license the content, the presumption being that the GFDL may change, but the loosest possible self-consistent set of restrictions would apply;

2) This paragraph should be of great interest to people. It concerns "Reusers' Rights and Obligations" and is highly amusing, because it says, among other things: ... "If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails ... that you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B) and you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J)", then goes on to say "However, please note that the Wikimedia Foundation makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles."

So what is hilarious is that Wikipedia doesn't even pretend to hold itself to the GFDL's requirements, while attempting to bind others to it. Again, I am uncertain of the implications of the switch to a GFDL that is "compatible" with CC-by-SA, but I daresay that it will not address this issue.

One of the overall implications of this is that my (non-legal) opinion is that any copyright action against a re-user of Wikipedia content is likely to fail, except in the most egregious cases. Wikipedia content is, for most intents and purposes, public domain. Simply appending a link to the GFDL is all that is needed for virtually any use.

In the US, perhaps. But in the rest of the World, especially Europe which has a much stricter definition of intellectual property, probably not.

In most of Europe, if you sign a contract that is clearly "reasonable" under the law, the contract is simply not valid.

Wikipedia is not just a US entity, in spite of what they would like to believe.

Even in the US, if push came to shove and somebody did seriously take this to court, I think that changing licenses would be seen as a "bait and switch" style operation. I don't think that this would fly anywhere, myself.

Now, could someone please explain to me how WP could hold the copyright of a derivative work if they are a "service provider" and not a "publisher"? By using this license, they are claiming "copyright", but how can they do this as a "service provider"?

that should have read



I can never keep track of what language I'm supposed to be speaking in the first place.

In the US it's the other way around. A contract with a merchant is valid even if you don't read it and don't sign it.

Greg Maxwell makes an intelligent point in this discussion :



In other words, they do not have the rights to change the license. Only the licensers have that right....Are they going to contact them? No, of course, not.

Is this going to cause a problem? No, not at first But it will at some point...

Well, that is a tenet of Western jurisprudence in general, and not specific to the EU or US. It is rooted in the notion of informed consent. The difference is how particular courts choose to interpret the level of informed consent.

To Moulton's point, if he was being other than wry, this is simply not the case. In the US there has been a good deal of judicial support of certain kinds of click-through and shrink-wrap licenses, but try putting "... and you cede to Seller all rights to your first-born male child ..." and see how far you get in a court trying to enforce that right.

But that is totally beside the point: copyright is special, and different from other kinds of licenses. You don't have to "agree" to a copyright-based license to make it both valid and binding -- books don't come with shrink-wrap licenses or any other kind. The Berne convention and accompanying treaties enshrine "All Rights Reserved" as the default case. The GPL and GFDL (and Creative Commons for that matter) attempt to modify that in certain ways.

These modifications and their enforceability have seldom been tried in court (once recently in Germany is all) and never in the US, and its step-child the GFDL never has. But this is not to say that the GPL, GFDL, or CC-by-SA are bad things: just that Wikipedia is a poor implementor of them, a very poor derivative-rights manager, and non-existent as an enforcer. They hypocritically yell about holding others to the GFDL while breaking it themselves.