Re: GFDL freedoms

[Adam McKenna <adam@flounder.net>]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 07:06:51PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> There are many jurisdictions without the US's concept of "fair use".  Freedoms
> depending on fair use are not sufficient for Debian--a license with non-free
> restrictions is not typically considered free because those restrictions are
> believed to be unenforcable in certain jurisdictions.
> 
> (It might be claimed that this lack of fair use is a peculiarity of local
> law, which Debian doesn't usually concern itself with, but I'm under the
> general impression that "fair use" itself is the peculiarity, not the lack
> of it, or at least that the implementation of fair use in different places
> differs too widely to base anything off of the US's particular version.)

I'm not talking about the US concept of "fair use" here.  I'm talking about
the definition of of a "Modified Version", given by GFDL.  Obviously the
wording of the definition is unfortunate, and needs work, but the real
question is, would any sane person or court really consider a work that cites
another work to be a modified version of the original work?  To me, it is
clearly a separate work, which is why I don't think Wouter's example is
valid.

--Adam