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386
Harvard Journal on Legislation
[Vol. 47

Some Creative Commons-licensed projects have adopted additional explanatory language that tends to emphasize the purportedly permanent and irrevocable character of the rights granted under the license. The massive online Wikipedia encyclopedia[1] supplies a prominent example. Since Wikipedia’s inception in 2001, user contributions have been licensed under the GFDL.[2] The same characteristics that make the GFDL problematic for content other than software manuals, however, meant that the license never fit perfectly with the rapidly evolving content of Wikipedia. In 2008, in response to a request from the Wikimedia Foundation (“WMF”),[3] a new “relicensing” section was added to the GFDL permitting some GFDL-licensed works to be relicensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.[4] Following a strongly favorable vote by the WMF user community,[5] WMF passed a resolution allowing dual licensing of WMF content (including Wikipedia) under both the GFDL and the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.[6] Today, visiting any editable Wikipedia page and clicking the “Edit this Page” button brings up the following warning at the bottom of the page: “You irrevocably agree to release your contributions under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 and the GFDL.”[7]

  1. ↑ Wikipedia, http://www.wikipedia.org/ (last visited Mar. 29, 2010). As of March 2010, the billion-word corpus of the English-language version of Wikipedia was approximately twenty-five times the size of the Encyclopædia Britannica, as measured only by estimated word counts—a statistic that excludes, for example, the rich graphic and tabular material unique to Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia Foundation sites. See Wikipedia, Size Comparisons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons (last visited Apr. 2, 2010).
  2. ↑ See Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia 72–73 (2009); see also supra notes 101–22 and accompanying text (discussing the GFDL).
  3. ↑ WMF, Resolution: License Update, http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update (last visited Apr. 2, 2010).
  4. ↑ See GFDL 1.3 FAQ, supra note 103; GFDLv1.3, supra note 103, § 11; see also Lih, supra note 142, at 212 (anticipating this development).
  5. ↑ See Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, Licensing Update/Result, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Result (last visited Apr. 2, 2010) (reflecting over seventy-five percent support for proposed relicensing and only ten percent opposition, among the over seventeen thousand valid votes). The author participated in the vote (in his role as a contributor to the English-language Wikisource project, a sister site of Wikipedia) and voted in favor of the relicensing proposal.
  6. ↑ See Press Release, WMF, Wikimedia Foundation Announces Important Licensing Change for Wikipedia and Its Sister Projects (May 21, 2009), available at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Dual_license_vote_May_2009. The joint action of the FSF and the WMF to enable the relicensing of Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license tends to suggest that one of the common criticisms of open-content licensing—namely, that a proliferation of license standards impedes rather than promotes sharing and reuse of the licensed content—has been overstated. See, e.g., Dusollier, supra note 8, at 1425–27; Elkin-Koren, supra note 118, at 412–13; Van Houweling, supra note 31, at 942.
  7. ↑ See Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org (last visited Mar. 29, 2010) (emphasis added). Go ahead, try it. You’ll see.
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