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. ---- Interpretations? --Jimbo