Legal/techy help needed

[triskellian]

I'm putting the finishing touches to a website assignment for my current course, but I'm having some problems with licensing. I want to use some chunks of text from Wikipedia, and, this being for academic purposes, I'm doing everything properly. I've been reading about the licensing hoops I have to jump through to ethically use Wikipedia content, and I think it's starting to become less, rather than more, clear.

This Wikipedia page first says I must license my new material under the GFDL, and then implies it is sufficient to add a notice of the form:

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Metasyntactic variable".

I can't find an "easy guide to releasing your document under the GFDL" on the GNU website, but my reading of the text of the license suggests the para above would be insufficient, and suggests instead a statement saying:

Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

...as well as including a full copy of the license, rather than merely a link back to the GNU site.

I'm sure some of you must know about this stuff. onebyone, I'm looking at you in particular. Please help!

(No link to the site because it's my offering for venta's advent-calendar-pot-luck, and it would be spoilery to post it now ;-)

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Well, reading the Wikipedia page, I'd be suprised if you fall under the Verbatim Copying section. I think, to qualify for that you'd really need to "host" the original content, exactly, and then provide references to the copy in your new material.
(I use "host" in quotes to allow for the fact that one might want to include hard copy of the pages, as an appendix to another document, for example).

However, if you were able to do that, I'd be expecting you to link directly to the wikipedia site in the first place (since we're talking about a website, rather than a printed document). There may be restrictions on the assignment which prohibit this, however.

If you want to only use certain subsections of a page, or intersperse your own material within theirs, then the derivative version rules apply (GFDL license, authorship of the original, and access to the original). And, possibly more worrying,

You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text

, which you may not be able to do, under academic restrictions...

(I also don't like Wikipedia's claim that

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the Wikipedia article hosted on this website.

Partially fulfill? What else do you need to do? Why don't they explain, or why do they think this might be inadequate (in which case, why mention it?).

Oh, and since I've included two quotes from that page, presumably this is now a derivative work? But there ain't no damn way that I'm including the full set of references. ;-)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Fair use, I think...

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I'd have thought that too.

Except I'm also bothered by the fact that Wikipedia seems fairly intent on explaining how it's allowed fair use of other people's documents, but conspicuously doesn't have any mention of fair use of it's own documents.

Maybe this is implicit under standard fair use arrangements, but for something which claims to have encyclopedic coverage, it would be quite nice if they actually did spell it out.

For example: does fair use mean you're allowed to quote 10% of the entire Wikipedia content without infringement?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Recursively enough, this page doesn't shed much light either.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Before you get into any of the complexities of GFDL, it's worth pointing out that the entire issue is a subset of copyright law. In particular, you can sometimes quite legitimately quote passages from things as part of an academic document up to certain limits.

What those limits are seems to be quite poorly understood in the case of web publishing. See, for example this document, which has very little to say for itself on the subject.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

onebyone, I'm looking at you in particular.

I don't like the GPL, which is why all my Wikipedia contributions are public domain. So I've never used GFDL and I'm basically guessing here.

If the question is "how do I license my work under GFDL?", then I recommend that you follow GNU's instructions rather than Wikipedia's. The people at Wikipedia may well know what they're talking about (Jimbo Wales is consulting GNU on GPL3, I think), but there's no point adding a layer of indirection.

Note that (just above the "how to use" title) the GFDL says "If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License "or any later version" applies... If the Document does not specify a version number of this License..." This suggests to me that it isn't a GFDL requirement that you use the exact text given in "How to use this License", and that you can jigger with it if you want to.

As to whether you have to include the text of the GFDL or merely link to it, I don't know.