Re: Dual-licensed wikibooks

Andrew Whitworth wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 8:17 PM, darklama <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I think before Wikibooks goes jumping head first into outright accepting
>> dual licensed books, Wikibooks first needs to as a project find
>> solutions to its current problems:
>>
>> 1. People are left hanging when it comes to what they need to do in
>> order to be in compliance with the GFDL. This requires people to be
>> experts in GFDL compliance.
> 
> I agree, and maybe it's worth our while to write up either an FAQ page
> about the GFDL, or shooting higher we could create an entire book
> about the GFDL. This would be an excellent opportunity to form some
> kind of working partnership with the FSF, or some other free content
> organization. Such a partnership and such a resource would help drive
> more traffic to Wikibooks. We could also see if groups like the FSF
> have any content on the issue already that they would be willing to
> make a donation of. Again, there is good advertising potential in
> this.

Having the FSF involved in writing a book might be a good start to
clarifying requirements Wikibooks and other projects need to follow
to be compliant. However I am hoping for something more. Like
a took to automatically generate the necessary attributions for
inclusion in a book in a way that makes it clear who did what under
what licensing terms. This involves needing to answer the question
of what's not enough and what's too much information?

>> 2. People are left to figure out what licenses images and other media
>> use, or if public domain or fair use is being used, and what that means
>> for there reuse, assuming people are even aware that other
>> considerations are necessary when reusing those parts of a book.
> 
> Agreed, the situation is already sticky enough because of
> multi-licensed images. I've experimented in the past with creating PDF
> versions and print versions of books that include licensing
> information about images in the book. This, to make a long story
> short, is very difficult, tedious, time-consuming manual work. I would
> love to see a technical solution implemented where image licensing
> information was automatically included in a generated print or PDF
> version. With the PDF extension in betatesting currently, this is the
> kind of feature we should be requesting en masse.

One possible solution to this could be to take the same attitude towards
media as some would like to take towards dual licensing books. Require 
that at a minimum all media must be licensed under the GFDL or allow
relicensing under the GFDL only.

Some questions and problems come to mind regarding this though. Are
people obligated to make other people aware that dual licensed media are
dual licensed? Is something really dual licensed if people cannot opt
out of the dual licensing or must use GFDL? Should Wikibooks have
different conditions for contributors as opposed to reusers and
redistributors? This would be necessary if Wikibooks wanted to require
all media on Wikibooks be at least GFDL, while not making reusers and
redistributors obligated to do the same. What benefits would there be
for Wikibooks to allow modifications done outside of Wikibooks to become
incompatible with Wikibooks' requirements?

Another solution is to just have a tool to generate the attributions
for all media used in a book. Question though is what is needed to 
attribute media used in a book? The media filenames aren't
necessarily going to be included with every use of the media within
the book to make it easy to associate license with media. Does this mean
in order to acknowledge the contributors of a media and the license used
that the media would need to be a literal part of the attribution? Does
every media that uses the same license still need a separate
attribution? Would separate attributions be needed if the book and all
media used in the book used the same license? Would this still be a
problem if the book and all the media in the book used the same license?

>> 3. People are left on their own when it comes to any legal ramifications
>> that might steam from getting any of this wrong, reducing the likelihood
>> that Wikibooks content will be reused, redistributed, and modified
>> outside of Wikibooks, except by the most savvy of users.
> 
> Herein lies the largest problem, I think, and the biggest impetus for
> us adopting a more flexible licensing scheme. We benefit internally
> from GFDL-consistency, but outside the WMF cloak the GFDL is not a
> particularly popular license for written content. Unfortunately we
> have thousands of books and sheer momentum dictates that we have to
> stay with the GFDL, at least as the primary license. This might be
> good reason for us to start putting pressure on the WMF, FSF, and CC
> to work on license interoperability issues.

I agree its the largest problem. However I think this problem exists
regardless of what license is used and the interoperability of the
license used. Wikibooks would just be replacing the issue of how to
correctly use one license with the issue of how to correctly use another
license, if a change in license were possible.

>> I think Wikibooks needs to solve these problems before even considering
>> trying to tackle dual licensed books and how to make it work, instead of
>> ignoring the current problems.
> 
> I would welcome a change in licensing policies if we could do it in a
> manner that was consistent in terms of implementation and legality. We
> obviously can't just change the license terms on existing books. I
> don't agree with any solution that is hacked together, tacked on after
> the fact, or handled haphazardly. Telling our authors that they can
> select arbitrary sets of licenses for their book, so long as they post
> disclaimers everywhere is very haphazard and is a poor implementation
> of this goal we seem to share.
> 
> --Andrew Whitworth

In theory by contributing to Wikibooks, Wikibooks is the organization
being granted a right to use the work under the GFDL, and could require
any further use of books and media outside of Wikibooks acknowledge
Wikibooks and link back to Wikibooks, unless individual contributors 
gives a person permission to do otherwise. This would mean that 
individual contributors would not need to be acknowledged unless someone
wants to use contents available on Wikibooks in some other way.

However I'm not sure whether that is legal. Right now Wikibooks'
copyright policy does say to link back to the book or module for use on
the Internet, and doesn't mention attributing contributors. Wikibooks
only seems to mention requiring attribution for hard copies. If changing 
Wikibooks' copyright policy to not require attributing contributors in 
hard copies were legal without needing more to be done first, than that 
would be my recommendation, as it would greatly simplify reuse and
redistribution in hard copy form.

I unfortunately have no real ideas on how to resolve these problems. I 
just believe anything that requires a lot of complicated work for anyone
to be compliant, to be unreasonable and unacceptable.

-- darklama on en.wikibooks