I don't think so. You license the material to be published subject to certain conditions. You don't release it without any conditions on the reuser, nor disclaim ownership of the text. You remain the copyright holder. If the reuse conditions are breached, you are the owner of the rights that were breached and have standing. What you don't have is a case that the loss was of any economic impact to you. You also might not have an argument that they used your text, if "your" edits have been significantly reworked or only a minor part was in fact used. You may have other remedies but that depends on local law - not all countries recognize the same legal structures (equitable remedies, injunctions/orders, etc). In many ways the Foundation may be the sole body that could take *effective* action if it came to law. This is a definite weak area of copyright law, which mainly seems to have been designed with the primary purpose of covering identifiable works whose reuse was clear, identifiable and economically impacted on the creator. A wiki article, made of edits by 20 people, where any one person's contribution is a sentence or so, and where no economic gain (just attribution) was sought by the author, is not copyright law's main focus. Deferring to lawyers on the list :) FT2 On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 6:13 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:

On 04/25/11 10:13 AM, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote: If the individual contributors don't have the standing to sue than nobody can! If contributing implies giving up "intrinsic" rights, why even bother with the mention of licences? If I understand it correctly Wikimedia has consistently refused even an assignment of the right to sue for infringement lest it jeopardize its status as an ISP. The WMF has no standing of its own on which to base an infringement suit. One's "permission" may still legally not amount to much, but that's not the same as it's non-existence. Ray