Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera AT zmsl.com>]

Rob Myers wrote:

> How can this be enforced downstream, in derivatives of the FDL work?

Here's something interesting. See Wikipedia's copyright notice:

<quote>
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document 
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or 
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no 
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
</quote>


It would be worth investigate the consequences of this notice.

One convenient interpretation is that they are are effectively making a 
new license, by taking GFDL and adding additional restrictions. If this 
interpretation is legally sound (or close to), maybe we can aim to make 
BY-SA compatible not with the standard GFDL but with this variation.

The consequences of this would be:
* You can't mix Wikipedia with standard GFDL work anyways.
* You could mix Wikipedia with BY-SA 3.0 without fear.
* We would get most of the benefit that GFDL-compat promises, without 
the same risks.

It would be interesting to get a lawyer to comment on the legal 
implications of Wikipedia's copyright notice.


> [But FDL is still so very different from BY-SA. How do I make an FDL  
> derivative of a CC-BY-SA poem into a song, or a story into a movie?  
> One of the CC licenses' strongest points is that they are designed to  
> allow deriving works across media. If I derive FDL work from GPL work  
> I'm locking the work pretty much to a textual format, breaking this  
> principle as well.]

I don't think anyone here doubts that BY-SA beats GFDL hands down :)

Cheers,
Daniel.
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