On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 10:15:30PM +0200, Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:
Anonymous contributions are problematic when licensing changes are needed. Wikipedia is big, but it will be a lot bigger in 10 years from now, with a lot more anonymous contributions.
The need for a license changes (in the future) is not zero:
- Copyright law itself changes regularly, so we can't look far in the
future and know what will be necessary then. 2) We don't know if FDL and CC-AT-SA are going to reach compatibility, 3) we don't know how a judge might rule if the "moral rights" in the European copyright-system conflict with public domain or copyleft licences. 4) The GNU licenses are english only, there is an internationalisation effort at CC. In many countries terms of use of a product need to be stated in the official languages of the country.
Therefore wouldn't it be better to ask the transfer of copyright from anonymous contributors instead of an actual license under the GFDL? This is not a vote against the FDL at all, but it would retain the possibility of a license change in the future. Now, with each anonymous contribution, a license change becomes more and more something of an impossibility.
Copyright could be transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation. A disclaimer could be issued that states that the contributions always will be used in a free and open copyleft spirit.
For contributors that have an account with a valid emailadres, nothing need to change. But if they loose interest, they should have the possibility to easy transfer their copyrights the Wikimedia Foundation.
What dou you think?
Legally can't work, copyright transfer can't be done by "clicking", and that's especially so if copyright owner is anonymous.