[Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

[Daniel Mayer]

Erik wrote:
>Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation. 
>If he refuses to make the necessary changes I strongly 
>recommend taking legal action as otherwise this could 
>easily become a precedent for third parties to use 
>Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should 
>probably send a warning letter anyway because of the 
>"this license extends solely .."  part.

Yes. I agree this is a violation since our copyright policy page clearly
indicates what actions need to be done to satisfy the GNU FDL requirements.
Each article is headed by its own history section and is thus a separate work.
But I don't think legal action will be needed if Anthony uses an ISP to host
his website. All we need is a takedown letter sent to the ISP if Anthony
refuses. 

>The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without 
>legal standing. I therefore would like to ask Alex in particular 
>to take a look at this case and help in preparing the necessary 
>letter. 

IANAL and this is only my opinion, but I no longer trust what Alex has to say
about copyright law. He has on several occasions now indicated that Wikipedia
is not a copyrightable work! I think such a position is outrageous, but that is
just my opinion and not a statement of fact. 

Alex wrote:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Do_fair_use_images_violate_the_GFDL%3F&diff=26034&oldid=26012

Excerpt: 
|The fact is that words in a dictionary are not subject to copyright 
|and if an encyclopedia is the conceptual extension of a dictionary 
|applied to concepts, theories, facts, historical developments then 
|if Wikipedia is truly collaborative writing then the work that is 
|created will be so generic as to be beyond the powers of copyright.  

I for one find it offensive to imply that what we do here is not sufficiently
creative to warrent copyright protection. 

Delirium wrote:
>On the other hand, we've indicated intent to publish a paper 
>version of the encyclopedia, which would very clearly be a 
>single document.  Or are we claiming it wouldnt' be?  If each 
>Wikipedia article is a separate document, any paper version 
>we produce would have to have a list of five authors and the 
>"history" section on *every single* article, which would take 
>up a pretty large percentage of the total encyclopedia. 

I don't think so. Just print out the network location of the original. If that
is not enough then we would eventually have to develop a bot that would extract
top 5 author info from each article and place it, along with the article's URL,
in the footer on each page in a small font. It would take one, maybe two lines
at the bottom of every page. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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