Wikipedia material can be used for free, but the people who
submitted articles to it retain some rights under the publishing
licence, the GNU Free Document License (FDL). That licence says
that any subsequent use of Wikipedia-published material must be
licensed under an FDL.
Most other free-to-use content on the internet is published
under the more common Creative Commons (CC) licence, which also
insists that subsequent works are published under a CC licence.
The body behind the FDL, though, has said that it will allow
Wikipedia to switch to a CC licence. Free software's most famous
advocate,
Lawrence Lessig, called the move "enormously important".
Wikipedia owner The Wikimedia Foundation will now decide whether
or not to move to a CC Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) licence,
but it has a deadline. The option is only open until 1st August
2009.
The change would allow people to take information from Wikipedia
and use it alongside Creative Commons-licensed material such as
video, audio or pictures. The resulting new work could be licensed
under a CC licence, whereas the current licensing regime means that
a hybrid work could not even be legally created.
The FDL was created by Richard Stallman and his Free Software
Foundation. It was invented for technical documents.
The Wikimedia Foundation resolved late last year to seek a way
to shift Wikipedia to a CC-BY-SA licence.
"The Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License
be modified in the fashion proposed by the [Free Software
Foundation] to allow migration by mass collaborative projects to
the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license," said its resolution.
A set of frequently asked questions published by Free Software
Foundation said that the change was made specifically to
accommodate Wikimedia.
"Normally, these sorts of licensing decisions can and should be
handled by the copyright holder(s) of a particular work," it said.
"However, because Wikipedia has many copyright holders, the project
needed some alternative way to accomplish this, and we've worked
with them to provide that."
The Wikimedia Foundation said that its next step is to discuss
the transfer with its community and vote on a final decision.
Lessig said that The Free Software Foundation's move was
extremely important. "It would be hard to overstate the importance
of this change to the Free Culture community," he said in a blog
post on the change.
"A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is that
its most important element – Wikipedia – is licensed in a way that
makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in
the Free Culture Movement," said Lessig.
"This change would now permit interoperability among Free
Culture projects … it thus eliminates an unnecessary and
unproductive hinderance to the spread and growth of Free Culture.
Richard Stallman deserves enormous credit for enabling this change
to occur," he said.
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