Ben Finney wrote:
<URL:http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html>
The fact that this essay is in the section "Third Party Ideas" is not a mere coincidence, IMO.
It is important to understand that not everything that flies is delicious when cooked and that the mushrooms in the forest cannot be treated equally.
Software is useless without a computer to compile (and/or interpret) and execute it, while a you can read a printed manual in the park without any machine at all. Not all written bits of digitally representable information are useful for the society to be modified, so I find it hard to believe that a math book with an invariant section "Dedicated to John Doe, my first student at the Foo University" renders the work non-free.
It would be substantially easier if judgement about freeness of a work is a boolean value, e.g. "This byte is modifiable, it is free" or "This byte is not modifiable, it is non free". But human brains are not mechanical parsers, and issues like these deserve serious thought; not always the easiest implementation/route is the right one.
The GNU FDL, although not ideal in some circumstances, is the most suitable license for such type of works. The new versions coming out soon will be even better.