Would not it be more expedient to ask for a non-exclusive general license to be transferred to Wikimedia Foundation, as Wikimedia's basic corporate purpose is to provide free content throughout the world (see http://www.sunbiz.org/COR/2003/0620/90039369.tif ) a grant of copyright license should be well protected by the Florida State AGs office, possible court intervention and the cy-pres doctrine, such a non-exclusive license would be vast enough to allow the original author to do whatever else they want with their work while giving Wikimedia enough power to prevent infringement by third parties and to create any variations of open source licenses or copyleft licences in the future. Also conflict of law (private international law) issues would be forstalled as their would be no issue of agency (mandate) if the author grants the foundation to grant further rights in the future.
Quaere: preventing the original author from using their own work as they wish does not fit with the underlying policy considerations behind the open content movement. If someone is writing a book and wants to contribute part of their book to a Wikimedia Foundation project that should not prevent them from completing their work and exploiting it without seeking approval from Wikimedia (which might be withheld), this would tend to scare away contributors who might otherwise have another outlet for their work and who might be willing to contribute on a non-exclusive basis.
The analogy with software is not the same as it is with other intellectual property content that might be author specific. The reason for having the copyright assigned in the software context is to prevent the software which essentially has many coauthors to have one author to represent it should anyone try and exploit it without respecting the rights of the authors. This is not the same kind of situation where there are contributors to a compilation work (such as Wikipedia); in the software situation it is doubtful that each coauthor would have any possible use for their contribution as the work functions as a whole, where as with a compliation each author can still find some potential use for their work outside of the compilation (textbook, encyclopedia, etc).
Facts, science and other information cannot be copyrighted anyway, they already exists outside the domain of ownership (except when it intersects with patent, trademark or other statutory protection schemes). Alex756
----- Original Message ----- "Imran Ghory" imran@bits.bris.ac.uk wrote on Sunday, August 03, 2003 6:49 PM Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions
IANAL. But I'm going to answer these questions from a legal viewpoint (without my personal opinion on the issue).
On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
The question before us then is this; can we state on our Wikibooks
copyright
policy page and on every edit page that by pressing save, that the
submitter
is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a non-exclusive right to license to use
their
own unique and copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other copyleft license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a
defintion
of "copyleft" linked from that word)?
Yes.
Can authors transfer the right re-license their work through a
click-through
agreement like we have with the "Save page" function, under the narrowly defined terms mentioned, without assigning away all their rights to the
work?
Yes.
Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from using purely FDL work
(such
as from Wikipedia)?
Yes. The person who is importing the work will not be able to legally save the page and meet the required conditions.
Related question: If the above is true then could we add such a notice
to
Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions (we would also have to contact every current and past contributor we could in order to ask them about the change in copyright terms; if they say no or we can't find
them
their text will only be under the FDL)?
Yes. If we were doing that we might as well ask for copyright assignments like the FSF do, so the wikipedia will be able to defend the copyright in court if it want to.
Imran
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