Re: Re: Question about re-use

In my non-lawyer opinion:

A human reading of a Wikipedia article would probably not be a verbatim copy, as it 
involves significant creative work, and it is possible to significantly change the 
meaning of the text by inflection.

An MP3 would technically be an Opaque copy, as it is not "suitable for revising the 
document straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of 
pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing 
editor". I'm sure this is, however, simply an oversight in the GFDL - it will hopefully 
be fixed in a later version, allowing us to place sound recordings under the GFDL.

You're worried about having to read out the license - I'm worried about having to 
read out the complete page history! This is why I like interpretations of the GFDL as 
applied to Wikipedia that don't consider the page history to be the "History" section 
as discussed by the GFDL, or indeed the "Title Page".

I think you can get away with just putting mention of the license, title page, history 
(ick) and so forth in ID3v2 tags (or whatever). This is the standard place to put meta-
data in audio, and is where listeners would expect to find such information. Taking a 
different approach would destroy GFDL'd music, for example, which would be an 
embarassing own goal. While not all MP3 players can read all of this data, people 
can always copy from MP3 player to PC to read the details, and again that's what 
they'd expect to have to do.

I'm starting to feel that meta-data like the full license and history and such should be 
treated the same way that the GPL treats source code - that'd be much more 
flexible, and far more suitable for our purposes. Another one for a later version.

-Martin "IANAL" Harper