Thelemapedia: Encyclopedia II - Thelemapedia - Managing editor creates controversial promotional pages

Thelemapedia - Managing editor creates controversial promotional pages

During March of 2005, then managing editor of Thelemapedia, Ash (John Bowie), created a promotional page for Thelemapedia on several hosting sites. The page consisted of quotes from two articles on the GNU FDL-licensed site Thelemapedia (30.6% original material, mostly headings and links, and 69.4% cited quotes, by word count). The pages included a copyright notice, but no immediately following GNU Free Documentation License notice, the rationale of the creator being that said quotes were used in good faith and did not violate the GNU FDL under the fair use doctrine of copyright law.

One of the contributors of content to the GNU FDL licensed articles which were quoted contacted Ash and asked him to post license notices in accordance with the generally accepted terms of the license. Ash disputed the claim of license violation, but agreed to bring the issue to the attention of the Free Software Foundation, asking for their opinion and agreeing to comply with their decision and recommendations. However, before an FSF representative could answer, the managing editor rewrote the pages without the quotes so as to avoid the possibility of violating the license.

The analysis by the Free Software Foundation concluded that the use of the quotes did indeed violate the GNU FDL, and that the GNU FDL should have been applied to the entire page by appending the required license notices. The current pages do not violate the GNU FDL. [4]

See also: Fair use, Viral license

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Managing editor creates controversial promotional pages", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki