Straight-up do-my-job-for-me question
. . . or rather, this is a do-the-job-I-have-been-assigned-that-comes-perilously-close-to-calling-for-specialized-expertise-I-do-not-have-and-anyway-who-the-hell-does question. I strongly doubt anybody reading this has the requisite understanding of copyright law, the GFDL, and works by the federal government-but, uh, read on if you're prepared to prove me wrong!
So let's say I am a government agency; let's say I might like to use a rather nice photo from Wikipedia in a publication of mine, one that's going to be distributed on the Web and in print. Being federal, I have my own weirdly copyleft set of rules surrounding the works I produce . . . but the real issue isn't the rules on my end, but the GDFL rules. There's some funny stuff in there about how the license continues to apply, and I'm scratching my head about how said funny stuff intersects with the government's own funny stuff.
Ideally, it'd just be a matter of using the photo, crediting it, letting the photographer know (for politeness's sake, not as a matter of necessity), and calling it done. I'm just . . . very inexpertly trying to figure out if there's some prospective badness around the whole issue.
So let's say I am a government agency; let's say I might like to use a rather nice photo from Wikipedia in a publication of mine, one that's going to be distributed on the Web and in print. Being federal, I have my own weirdly copyleft set of rules surrounding the works I produce . . . but the real issue isn't the rules on my end, but the GDFL rules. There's some funny stuff in there about how the license continues to apply, and I'm scratching my head about how said funny stuff intersects with the government's own funny stuff.
Ideally, it'd just be a matter of using the photo, crediting it, letting the photographer know (for politeness's sake, not as a matter of necessity), and calling it done. I'm just . . . very inexpertly trying to figure out if there's some prospective badness around the whole issue.