License Madness
Today I wanted to take a few moments to contribute to the commons by improving a few pages on Wikitravel. The first page lacked any images and I though I just take a few nice ones from Wikipedia. But, not so fast; as it turns out Wikipedia is GFDL licensed, while Wikitravel is CC-BY-SA-1.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic) licensed - and these licenses are incompatible. I cannot copy something from Wikipedia unless I have authored it myself or have asked all authors. Exactly the problem CC licenses try to prevent.
Now, the images on Wikipedia can have different licenses and so some of these can be used. But even images that are licensed under CC-BY-SA, are often licensed under a different version. In fact there seem to be 5 major version (1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 2.5, 3.0 - 2.5 seems to the most frequently used, followed by 3.0 and 2.0) and many more localized version. That's really problematic - how on earth should I know whether I can an upload an image licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.5-DK (the Danish localization of the 2.5 version of the creative commons attribution share alike license) to a site using for example CC-BY-SA-2.0-KR (the Korean localization of the 2.0 version ...). Not even to mention the question on the compatibility of Wikitravel's CC-BY-SA-1.0 with theoretically less restrictive licenses such as CC-BY-2.1-JP (the Japanese localization of creative commons attributions licence version 2.1 - still used for 1100 Wikimedia Commons images).
Luckily Wikitravel also allows images to have a license different the CC-BY-SA-1.0 used for the text - and so I can use pictures licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.1-JP. Still I cannot use CC-BY-SA-2.5-JP (a newer version of this Japanese license) or CC-BY-2.1-ES (the Spanish version of the same license) and I still don't know about the less restrictive CC-BY-2.1-JP mentioned above. Why this selection of licenses? - I don't know, but it says so here.
Turning to Flickr (another great source for images), we see that they support 7 different Creative Commons licenses, but not the CC-BY-SA-1.0 license of Wikitravel. However, 2 of the 6 licenses are at least accepted for images on Wikitravel but, alas of the almost 2.8 billion pictures* on Flickr, 77 million are CC licensed (2.7%) and only 12 million (15% of the CC licensed, .4% overall) are licensed compatible to Wikitravel.
I don't see a simple answer to this problem - probably it will be a while until an agreement on the best open licence emerges. But there is one thing we can all do: If you want to contribute, try to release your stuff into the public domain. Only then can you be sure that it can be reused with whatever collaboration platform may be devised in the future. That's not because a restriction e.g. to get acknowledged is unreasonable - its only because the restrictions can be worded in so many different ways that it will inevitably lead to incompatibilities. I know, there are some things that your need to continue to control, but there are many more where its really not going to hurt you.
I for one, have freed the few images I've uploaded to Wikipedia and put them into the public domain - please do the same for yours! And yes, actually I would like people using these pictures to include an attribution, but that's a matter of good behavior, not a question that lawyers should be involved in.
*: In fact 2785244632 uploaded pictures by the time I write this - Flickr numbers its pictures consecutively, so you can see the absolute number of pictures uploaded by looking at the URLs of the pictures most recently uploaded. Although this also includes some movies and pictures since deleted.
