[WikiEN-l] Slashdot: Book plagarized Wikipedia

[Eugene van der Pijll]

Matthew Brown schreef:
> On Nov 14, 2007 1:00 PM, Kwan Ting Chan <ktc at ktchan.info> wrote:
> > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/open_source_railroad/
> 
> Which to my understanding says that if you distribute an open source
> project you have in effect agreed to the license, which is a form of
> contract, and if you breach the license it is not copyright
> infringement but breach of contract.

Note that according to the The Register story, this was about the
Artistic License. You cannot generalise this to other open source
licenses.

Clause 9 of the GFDL says:
"You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except
as expressly provided for under this License. Any other attempt to copy,
modify, sublicense or distribute the Document is void, and will
automatically terminate your rights under this License. [...]"

So breaking the contract results in voiding the license agreement, which
means that further distribution would be a copyright violation. The
Artistic License lacks a similar clause.

This difference may well lead a judge to come to different conclusions
on both licenses. But [[IANAL]] (IAAP).

Eugene