Question about re-use

Jimmy Wales <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.org.wikimedia.legal
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I just bought a handy little MP3 player.  If I go for a walk (likely)
or jogging (unlikely) or to the gym (not as likely as it should be), I
can now listen to music or audiobooks.  So I thought "Wouldn't it be
neat to have some Wikipedia articles to listen to?"

I could use text-to-speech software, but as far as I know, the output
is not very humanlike yet, and this could be annoying.

I could read the articles myself and record that, and make mp3s and
listen to those, but what would be the point?  I would have already
read those articles.

So it occurred to me that what would be neat is if lots of people were
interested in the same thing.  I might read 10 articles into my
computer and then share them with a sensible title over Gnutella
networks.  "Wikipedia - Pete Rose.mp3" for example.  And then lots and
lots of other people might do the same thing.  

We might even like to have an official project with a bit of invariant
text at the front saying "This is the official version from the
Wikipedia Readers Club of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc."  But mabe we
don't care about that.  Anyhow, that's not my question.

Is this possible under the GNU FDL?  It seems that it ought to be
trivially possible, it's the whole *point* of the GNU FDL, really,
freely sharing content across multiple media.

1.  Is it a verbatim copy?  If so, then under section 2 of the
license, we have to distribute the license along with the copy.
Reading the whole boring license into the mp3 sounds stupid and
annoying and useless to me, but that's what a literal reading would
suggest.

2.  Section 3 of the license appears to say that if I distribute a
verbatim copy that is opaque and numbers more than 100, then I just
have to give a network location where it exists, and must take
reasonably prudent steps to ensure that it'll continue to exist there
for at least one year.  This sounds easy for people to do.  Just say
"This is a verbatim reading of the December 14, 2003 version of this
article.  It can currently be accessed at
http://www.wikipedia.org/blahblahblah.  The current version of the
article can be accessed at..."  

A reasonably prudent person would expect that Wikipedia's website will
still exist a year from now, so that should be fine.

HOWEVER, this still doesn't solve the problem from item 1, i.e. the
requirement that the license itself be included.

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Interpretations?

--Jimbo
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