Out-Law News 2 min. read

Wikipedia content will be set free for collaboration if licence change approved


Content published on user-generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia might soon be usable along with content from other open source information projects. The licence under which Wikipedia is published currently makes that impossible in most cases.

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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