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DeutschBreaking news: Wikipedia announces Creative Commons compatibility!
Sylvain (Jamendo’s CTO) just got back from a Wikipedia/iCommons party in San Francisco where he taped a very exciting announcement from Jimmy Wales : Creative Commons, Wikimedia and the Free Software Foundation just agreed to make the current Wikipedia license (the GFDL) compatible with Creative Commons (CC BY-SA). As Jimbo puts it, “This is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia”.
(UPDATE: Official resolution from the Wikimedia Foundation, thanks Florence!)
Here is a transcript (feel free to send patches) followed by a quick analysis of the announcement.
Jimmy Wales: So the really fabulous thing about Creative Commons is that CC has designed a full spectrum of licenses that people can use to share their work and these licenses are ported to different jurisdictions around the world and they are easy for normal people to undersand.
If Wikipedia had been founded after CC it would certainly have been under a CC license but it didn’t exist at the time, so we started with a license called the Free Documentation License which is a good license but very complicated and very difficult to use.
So a couple of years ago, Larry and I were walking in a park in Barcelona and started talking about license compatibility and how important this is. So he and I started a project to try to find a way for Wikipedia, which has become by far the largest repository of information in the world, and the largest repository of freely licensed information that ever existed by far and we said, “How can we make this compatible with the whole CC movement ?”
So we went through a long process of negociation with the Free Software Foundation, many many different conversations, very complicated and with lots of legal aspects.
What I’m happy to announce tonight is that just yesterday the Wikimedia Foundation board voted to approve a deal beetween the FSF and CC and Wikimedia. We’re going to change the GFDL in such a way that Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
So this is not as some people speculated on facebook my 58 birthday party … this is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia.
Audience: Hooray / woooo / Larry, Larry, Larry!
Lawrence Lessig: So there are 3 great things that happened to my life. Two of them coming from my wife, this is the 3rd greatest thing that ever happened to my life, Jimmy. I’m grateful to your visit, thank you very much, you are just welcomed, thank you.
–
So what does this mean for Wikipedia? A lot of people will now be able to legally mix Wikipedia and Creative Commons content. This announcement marks the end of a lack of interoperability of the licenses that was making the content less “free” for the users.
Contrary to the old title of this post (thanks to Larry for the clarification) Wikipedia is not switching to CC. It actually made a deal allowing the community to relicense the content of the wikis under a BY-SA license. So it’s now up to the Wikipedians to choose whether they do or not.
Anyway, Creative Commons will definitely have more weight and credibilty tomorrow than it had this morning. 4 out of the 10 biggest websites in the world now integrate Creative Commons.
The next important event is the 5th birthday of Creative Commons on the 15th of December. A joint announcement with Jamendo will be made then, so stay tuned!
December 1st, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Actually, what the mechanics of this will be will likely involve invoking the clause to update to the next version of GFDL. Which will in-effect be made compatible with an appropriate CC license. I’d guess both licenses will get new versions, and you’ll legally be able to quote a paragraph from Wikipedia without having to cite the entire GFDL. To my thinking that has been the biggest drawback.
December 1st, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Hello,
I invite you to read the text of the resolution approved by the board of Wikimedia Foundation regarding the change of license
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update
Thanks
Florence
December 1st, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Making GFDL and CC-By-SA compatible is *not* the same as switching from GFDL to CC. Doesn’t help if you starts off with getting the title of the post incorrect.
December 1st, 2007 at 6:22 pm
thanks for the precisions folks, I must say I’m not a GFDL expert, that’s why I preferred making a transcript rather than a full analysis of the announcement ;-)
Florence: thank you, I’ve added the link in the post :)
KTC: “migration” and “liberation” are used by the resolution and Jimmy. I think that’s strong enough to talk about a “switch”, don’t you?
Anyway, I’d be glad to know what you think this will bring to both organizations and communities?
December 1st, 2007 at 10:28 pm
title changed to ‘Breaking news: Wikipedia announces Creative Commons compatibility!’ which is indeed more correct. thanks for your remarks
December 2nd, 2007 at 12:10 am
I’m glad to see this. The GFDL license situation has always been a bit of a pain. I lead a specialist wiki (WikiFur), and as part of our activities we take certain articles that Wikipedia doesn’t want to host. We’d have preferred to license our work as CC-BY-SA if we hadn’t had to have GFDL compatibility for transfers to and from Wikipedia. Now, perhaps, we can have the best of both worlds.
December 2nd, 2007 at 1:07 am
I wish people would learn how to spell “definitely” or use their spell-checkers.
December 2nd, 2007 at 4:57 am
Yes, “compatibility” and not “switch” is the right spin. When I first read “switch”, I thought to myself “Hey, they can’t do that! That’s my work they’re talking about, and they can’t unilaterally do that!”. When I re-read as “made compatible”, I calmed down; “yeah whatever” is a plausible reaction.
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:56 am
It’s great to see this. Past licensing has been an issue and I hope this will smooth things along.
_denise
December 2nd, 2007 at 7:40 am
A great step forward and in the spirit of open information to everyone I translated the news and Jimmy’s speech to Spanish (Español o Castellano) en http://layman-news.blogspot.com/2007/12/wikipedia-ahora-compatible-con-licencia.html
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:16 am
Are CC licenses part of the U.S. Code? I don’t know much about CC/GNU FDL but I am just wondering if these licenses have any sort of legal grounding.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:05 am
Lee: sorry for that, we’re not native speakers. It’s corrected, thanks.
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:17 pm
The GFDL and various CC licenses are as legally valid as any other license under US law. They don’t have to be enacted by the legislature, just recognized by the courts.
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Thank you for very Good News that will make good change on wikipedia. I linked this thread on my blog. and qouted Lessig’s speech. is it OK?
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Scott: it’s called “copyright” and it’s a part of law which means that the person who writes “creative work” has the right to limit copying of that work to only people who are licensed to copy. You can chose to give a license to anyone you want to and you are also allowed to put certain terms in that license which limit what the people can do. You’ll find a good article about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright. Since these are permissive licenses, it’s likely that even if they were found to be invalid later, you would still find that following them would protect you from any statutory damages the Free Software Foundation or others using it’s license wanted to collect against you.
December 2nd, 2007 at 7:57 pm
The press release or whatever isn’t very clear (they even had to edit this article’s title, go figure). I’ve contributed content to wikipedia, and I am no fan of the creative commons. I am concerned about my intellectual property, since there (apparently from the vague content of the article) is a chance that my property will be relicensed without my consent nor knowledge. Should any content (mine or others) be relicensed without consent, I will at that time be forced to stop contributing to wikipedia, and may also demand that my property be moved from the site.
About the GNU FDL… why is this license being altered? Again, this concerns me greatly. I’m a free software developer, and the GLP v.3 scares me. Hearing that the documentation license will be altered does not instill confidence, IMHO.
Also, what’s this about Lessig equating this license change to the birth of his children? Surely this press release was intended for April 1, 2008?
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Thanks for the great news! I published it in Bulgarian.
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:19 am
Joey: I think you agreed to license your wikipedia contributions for the GFDL and any future revision of it. So it’s up to the FSF to decide what the next revision will include. IMHO this is basically based on the fact that everybody trusts the FSF. And now the FSF trusts CC for that license, so I don’t think there’s a good reason to be afraid. The legal terms didn’t change that much compared to GPLv2/3 (just some minor details as I understand)
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Joey: Note that the edit page on Wikipedia says “GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version” i.e. it includes ver 1.3 or 14.2 or whatever.
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Thanks (Sylvain) for capturing the announcement and uploading it, plus the transcript.
I saw this last night and it brought a large smile to my face. I made contact with Prof Lessig a couple of weeks ago.
Rock on….
Graham
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:13 am
thanks for the mention of links, I appreciate that it.
January 25th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
That’s great news!
February 16th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Thanks for sharing
May 20th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
[...] information here. So what does this mean for Wikipedia? A lot of people will now be able to legally mix Wikipedia [...]
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:18 pm
[...] Breaking news: Wikipedia announces Creative Commons compatibility! [...]
June 23rd, 2008 at 5:16 am
[...] been decided, why not? Will this ever be declared? Surely we should expect it to be, given the triumphant announcement Lessig and Wales last December. [...]
June 29th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
[...] Wikimedia Foundation, FSF si Creative Commons au incheiat un accord prin care continutul Wikipedia va putea fi re-licentiat sub Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (cc by-sa). Articolele Wikipedia sunt momentan sub licenta GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), dar FSF o va modifica pentru a o face compatibila cu cc by-sa. Asta inseamna ca vom putea folosi continutul Wikipedia atat in scopuri comerciale cat si necomerciale, atat timp cat lucrarea noastra foloseste o licenta CC Share-Alike. Sursa [...]