[mb-users] "The need for free and open music metadata", but MB not good enough

[Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen]

Paul Taylor skrev:
>What I dont understand is can this guy just merge wikipedia and 
>musicbrainz data, I thought wikipedia used a different license which 
>prevented Musicbrainz from just automatically sucking in useful info it 
>did have.

I wondered about the exact same thing, so I went to take a look[1]. As 
long as he's just using the factual data (ie., data which is 
un-copyrightable anyway), he should be clear to freely pull in data from 
our side at least. However, as soon as they wish to pull in regular 
updates from MusicBrainz through the LiveDataFeed, the have to subject 
to the CC by-nc-sa[2], which means they have to release _their_ data 
under CC by-nc-sa.

Wikipedia's GFDL[3] is also a viral license[4], so either way, they'll 
have to make their data available under this license too. However, if 
they do this, they can't pull in our LiveDataFeed, as the "nc" at least 
marks a difference between the two licenses – the GFDL doesn't stop 
anyone from making money off the data[4]!

[1] http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainzLicense
[2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
[3] 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License
[4] "You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document 
[...], provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely 
this License, [...]" (source [3])
[5] "You may copy and distribute the [text] in any medium, either 
commercially or noncommercially, [...]" (source [3])

-- 
Sincerely,
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen <http://freso.dk/>

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