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(a)bits.bris.ac.uk> wrote on Sunday, August 03, 2003 6:49 PM Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions copyright submitter their defintion click-through work? (such to them

Imran Ghory wrote: The problem I see with this is that it precludes people from cutting and pasting text from GNU FDL-only sources such as Wikipedia. The reason is that the person who is pasting it has *no right* to tell us that we can relicense that text under a different license. I still think there's some promise in the notion of a disjunctive license, but I'm still puzzling it out with the authorities. Oh, I see Imran says the same as me. I think this is an insurmountable obstacle for us on this particular front. That's right, we could do that, but what a tracking nightmare! Every article in Wikipedia would have to be flagged somehow. This *could* conceivably work, though. We could set up software tools to allow signed-in contributors to click-agree that all of their past contributions can be flexibly licensed. But unless we have a *really good* reason, and I don't see that we do, we shouldn't do this. --Jimbo

Daniel Ehrenberg wrote: Yes, I'm proposing something of that nature. --Jimbo