[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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