I don’t think that the GFDL restricts one from including derivatives similarly-licensed media whose licenses don’t provide any further restrictions on usage than what the GFDL allows, provided that a clear distinction can be recognized between the origins of either component in the same meedia. The CC-by-ND, I have no idea about if it has such compatibility with non-conflicting permissive licenses.

For the record, the Wikimedia Commons, unless it previously did when you wrote this, doesn’t allow for media that restricts commercial or derivative uses to be submitted. So no CC-by-ND or CC-by-NC stuff is uploaded or present on there.

But yes, I share your pain. In building LeMill, an educational resource sharing and remixing site, we’ve had to lock all content into one single license (CC-BY-SA) because allowing several licenses would make the remixing job a legal license hell.

Since the application of a more restrictive license on a derivative does not retroactively apply to the original, I’m not sure this analogy applies quite the same way. It would be more like someone exploiting the rights and practices of a free society to go someplace and create a more restrictive society within it… and it seems to me more repressive “mini-societies” exist all over the place within Canada and other countries that think they are free societies.

Of course, whether collectives should be allowed to override individual rights (say, equality of women) is an ongoing argument, at least in western democratic countries.

I’m still wading through this stuff in my own tiny brain, but it’s hard not to agree that the incompatibility of these licenses is a problem, especially since most of us are working in that “who cares?” camp. I mix components with incompatible licenses all the time, and either people aren’t noticing, or perhaps they are recognising I am doing it in something that seems like “good faith” and cut me some slack. Obviously, the typical user just getting their head around sharing isn’t going to be able to track this stuff. “Frictionless adaptability” it ain’t…

I take your point, though, that perhaps downstream users might be given more freedom to choose licences. I think the current language reflects legal reality, in that if you are not THAT specific about permissible licenses, someone will quickly find a loophole through which to drag your hard work into a commercial dead-end.