User:VeryVerily/Licensing

Disclaimer: IANAL, these are my own conclusions.

Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which allows the creation and distribution of "free" content in the sense of the copyleft model. The intent is to keep the content free by requiring that derived works must also be made free. This differs from public domain, where the content is free in the different sense that people may make derived works and do whatever they wish with them.

However, even if one likes the copyleft goal, the GFDL is "clunky" in several ways:

It requires several pages of legal text to be attached to all works. See the discussion on Wikitravel of the difficulties this presents in distributing short articles.

It is a jealous license, in that derived works are required to also be under the GFDL. Thus, other licenses which provide effectively the same protection, often in a more streamlined and direct way, cannot be used with derived GFDL works. In particular, two works under two different licenses cannot be combined, a big problem for wikis.

The Creative Commons (CC) suite of licenses is a more recent alternative, developed to promote free content. The CC provides a variety of different licenses, including several copyleft-esque ones (called share-alike). The CC's user-friendly, clear, and streamlined license has made it very popular, in particular with wiki projects. Wikipedia, however, founded prior to CC, is to some extent bound to the GFDL.

Multi-licensing

However, authors of edits are the owners of them as intellectual property. By submitting them to Wikipedia, the author agrees to release them under the GFDL. However, the author is also free to release them under additional, more liberal licenses. For example, a user could multilicense under cc-by-sa, another popular copyleft license, and then their work can also be used by and combined with CC-based wikis.

Here are some other useful licenses:

cc-by-sa. Allows anyone to use the work as long as derived works are also released under the cc-by-sa and credit is given to the author(s). Thus, by releasing under both the GFDL and cc-by-sa, either kind of wiki can use the work.

cc-by. Allows anyone to freely use the work as long as proper credit is given to the author.

Public domain. Allows anyone at all to use the work with no conditions attached.

Licensing of my edits

All of my edits on Wikipedia to the article (main) and template namespaces are released under cc-by-sa-2.0.

This is a draft proposal of further licensing arrangements for my edits, which is not in effect as of this writing. If this notice has not been removed by me by March 1, 2005, then my edits will be thereby released as stated in this section in the last version of this page edited by me.

All of my edits to the article (main) and template namespaces are hereby released under cc-by-sa-2.0 and cc-by-nc-2.0. Is this what I want?

All edits marked as minor in the article and template namespaces are released under cc-by-2.0.

I would like to extend to the whole world the rights extended under American fair use doctrine.

Since IANAL, legal insight is welcome on the talk page.

Comments policy

This should probably be moved to a separate page.

Please do not refactor, alter, or censor any of my signed comments. This includes even spelling or grammar fixes. I simply feel the risk of misattribution (of some concern to me), accidental or no, is too great. Of course summarizing, quoting, or alluding to is fine, as long as it's clear that what is presented is a summary by another user of what I said.

In general I will not alter my comments after the fact either except to make minor fixes. The "after the fact" exception applies to immediate rewrites when I should have used "Show preview" first ;). I generally update the timestamp for non-minor changes. What constitutes "immediate" is up to me; if others have responded to that comment or many have likely read it, usually I won't alter it but will rely on ~~strikeout~~ and the like.