fair use through dual licensing?

Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>I've been thinking of the "fair use" issue, and I've come up with 
>an idea which I'd like to run past everyone.  Why not have users 
>dual license their text under the GFDL and Creative Commons 
>by-nc (attribution required and no-commercial use, with derivitives 
>allowed).   
>...

We discussed the idea of GFDL/CC by-sa dual licensing scheme to exhaustive  
length on Textbook-l (Wikibook's mailing list) and decided that it would 
serve no useful purpose. Why? Because compulsory dual-licensing like that 
would prevent Wikibooks from accepting either GFDL-only licensed text or CC 
by-sa-only licensed text. It is also would not possible to transfer the dual 
licensing scheme to third parties; they would have to choose to use either 
the GFDL or the CC by-sa. So we would be in the absurd situation where we 
could not by default re-incorporate improvements to Wikibooks' content by 
third parties! 

The situation for already established projects like Wikipedia is even worse: 
It would be impossible to get every person who ever contributed to Wikipedia 
to agree to dual license their work under both the GFDL and the CC by-sa. So 
any article with previous versions under just the GFDL could not be edited 
ever again. Why? Because editing the article would create a derivative work 
and since the previous version was under just the GFDL that derivative work 
would also have to be under just the GFDL. 

And even if we were able to accomplish the impossible and get the many 
thousands of people who ever contributed (including Anons) to Wikipedia to 
agree to dual license their work, we would still be faced with the absurd 
situtation I noted with the Wikibooks discussion. 

What a confusing mess!

>Additionally, make a "public domain" checkbox for submissions, 
>certainly for images, so this information can be easily scanned.  
>Strongly discourage non-PD (and non-GFDL) image submissions, 
>and try to replace what is already there by clearly-marked public 
>domain content whenever possible.

This has already been suggested for file uploads. The idea is to require every 
uploader to choose some radio buttons to select the terms of the file's use 
(public domain, GFDL, other free license, fair use for educational purpose, 
fair use for any use, non-commercial use only, etc). Then, downstream users 
of our database could extract just those files that suit their situtation (a 
commercial downstream user would not choose to include 'non-commercial use 
only' or 'fair use for educational purpose' images, for example). 

Antother idea would be to have a policy to /only/ allow files to be used under 
the 'fair use' doctrine if, and only if all downstream users of the article 
in whole could make a valid claim of fair use. Such a policy would also 
exclude the use of any files covered by 'non-commercial use' licenses since 
many downstream users will be commercial. 

I personally like the first option. But that needs to be coded. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)