Jimbo wrote:

Maybe! But there are advantages for all of us to contribute our copyrights to the foundation.

Can we make copyright assignment compulsory for anonymous contributions to Wikibooks then? This is something I have often seen other Wikis do (Anon contribs are a special case because it is much more difficult to track them down in order to ask them about copyright changes). Maybe this in combination with requiring valid email to activate user accounts will make the copyright situation more bearable for Wikibooks.

Both of these ideas might also be a good for Wikipedia too (for new accounts and edits made by Anons after a certain date) - but I would like to see if it works on Wikibooks first.

That way we at least have some way to contact users in case of a copyright change (simply knowing a previous email address - even if no longer valid - should help a great deal in tracking someone down in order to ask them about relicensing).

Aside: A prominent link to a privacy policy should be incorporated into the Special:userlogin page in order to assuage people's fears over giving out their email address - but that is needed anyway.

It's too late now, of course, but all of our licensing /relicensing questions would be a lot easier to deal with if the foundation owned all the copyrights.

<beating a dead horse> Again, I would be very wary of that; there is would be no guarantee against the Foundation selling its soul (copyrights) to the Devil (*cough* Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation *cough*) for a large grant (by-laws and Foundation constitutions can change). By making it fairly difficult, but not impossible, to change copyright, we add another layer of protection and filter against such a thing happening. Power to the people. </beating a dead horse>

The FSF requires an assignment of copyrights to them for any official FSF projects. This policy would not work for us -- it's too late, and would interfere with the wiki model. But if people voluntarily do it, I think it's a good idea.

We should make it easy for logged-in users to assign copyright if they so choose - it is their text and their right (a push button interface to flag user accounts, and thus user edits, would be nice). But paranoid people like me will leave copyright assignment clauses in our Wills (or if we are rich, then clear instructions to our estates on how those copyrights can be used).

But I plan on being very contactable until then, so if a relicensing of my work needs to occur, then just ask.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)