Development of Creative Commons licenses

[wiki_tomos <wiki_tomos AT inter7.jp>]

Daniel Carrera wrote:

>Matthew McDermott wrote:
>> It would seem odd to have just
>> those articles under the GNU on my site alongside a Wiki of CC articles
>> and I wonder if that is even legally viable?
>
>Sadly, the GFDL is just not compatible with any license but itself. Your 
>best bet is what you wrote above.
>

True, and I also feel it is a sad thing. 

But if those documents Matthew wants to bring in to his wiki 
are independent works from other pages of his wiki, I suppose 
he can treat the entire wiki as a collective work. The collective 
work could include GFDL component and CC component. 

GFDL's section 7, 1st para. reads as follows:
"A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate 
and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage 
or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the copyright 
resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal 
rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual 
works permit. When the Document is included in an aggregate, 
this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate 
which are not themselves derivative works of the Document."

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

And then CC-BY-SA's 4.a. includes the following sentense:

"The above applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collective 
Work, but this does not require the Collective Work apart from 
the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License."

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode)

CC license has many variants with different combinations of 
license elements and versions. But I suppose the part I quoted 
above is in all variants. 

So perhaps it is okay to have one page in a wiki to be GFDL'd 
and another to be CC'd. Indeed, some of Wikipedia's images 
are licensed variously, some under GFDL, others in CC, etc.

But please be warned that I am not a lawyer. All I say here could 
well be wrong. 

Regards, 

Tomos