[cc-community] Derivative of GFDL work licensable under BY-SA?
Rob Myers
rob at robmyers.org
Sat Dec 22 06:04:26 EST 2007
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Matt Agnello wrote:
> I'm working on making a derivative work of a verbatim audio reading of
> Wikipedia's GFDL article. The audio recording, listed on the page
> itself, is under the same copyright as the original page (Wikipedia's
> GFDL). The derivative will be highly edited, combined with video, and
> will not necessarily resemble the original at all. However, I'd like to
> license the derivative under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. Is this
> possible? Will I have to or should I dual-license?
You cannot currently BY-SA or dual license the work under the terms of
the FDL. Under the FDL any derivatives have to be FDL.
If you are in the US you *might* be able to claim that your new work is
covered by Fair Use. You could then license it however you want,
including BY-SA or BY-SA/FDL. But this would depend on the precise
nature of your new work, and I don't know enough to say whether it would
qualify as fair use or not. I would be very wary of claiming fair use on
a recognizable derivative of a piece of audio.
> Before I even begin to consider the specifics of how to implement the
> GFDL in video, should I just wait until Wikipedia supports BY-SA in some
> way to bother thinking about licenses?
You could FDL it for now and then people would at least be able to
licence derivatives under BY-SA when compatibility comes in. That is
probably the best solution.
- Rob.
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