[Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

[Evan Prodromou]

>>>>> "AR" == Alex R <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> writes:

    AR> Wikipedia copyright is so diluted anyway that it is
    AR> practically a grant into the public domain anyway.

I'm confused as to why it's "diluted". Because so many people have had
a hand in making the encyclopedia itself? Or each article?

    AR> I doubt that Wikipedia could really sue for individual
    AR> articles the damages are really minimal and even wholesale
    AR> copying by "forking" would probably be held to be almost
    AR> unenforceable because what are the real damages to Wikipedia?

Not to mention that I don't think Mediawiki holds copyright on much of
anything on any of the Wikimedia sites. It would have to be individual
authors that sue, AFAICT. Or perhaps Wikipedia could act as
"publisher" on behalf on anonymous authors.

By the way, do you have to show damages in order to get a court order
to stop distributing copyright-violating material? I was under the
impression that you didn't.

    AR> It allows free copying anyway with just some moral rights
    AR> notices that are not that enforceable in US law anyway;

My understand was that copyleft Free Software licenses were pretty
darn enforceable. Viz this article by Eben Moglen:

   http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-09-18-013-20-OP-LL

Do you think he's wrong? Or that Free Content is significantly
different from Free Software?

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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