It seems to me that the most plausible place in which someone could use the GFDL in suing is if you re-used improperly re-used material.
For example: Company X downloads GFDL material from Wikipedia but does not correctly comply with the terms of the GFDL. Company Y knows Company X's material is GFDL and re-uses it themselves. Company X sues Company Y; Company Y pulls out the GFDL, proves the material was originally licensed under it, counter-sues Company X for having claimed they had copyright control over something they they did not.
Of course, Wikipedia/media gets nothing out of this.
Other than that, though, unless we are talking about a class-action suit (all Wikipedians who had worked on a given article), I don't know how you'd ever coordinate something like this...
FF
On 5/15/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 5/15/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/15/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Rob Church wrote:
On 12/05/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
And if that's the case, can we sue? Please?
Good luck with that.
The Foundation can't, because it doesn't own the copyright to the material. It's up to the copyright holder to enforce their licencing.
Could The Foundation sue /on behalf of/ those authors whose copyright has been violated?
INAL but my understanding is. Under US law they could if given permission to do so by the copyright holders (the situtation is compicated in the case of minors. The foundation would probably need their parents/gardians permissions).
At the very least it would certainly be possible for anyone who can enter into a contract to assign their copyright to the foundation.
How many people you need permission from depends if you consider Wikipedia to be a work of joint ownership or not (the other alternative is that each work is independently created as a derivative of the previous). I tend to believe it would be considered a joint work, as it makes the application of the GFDL a lot cleaner. Actually, I think the cleanest interpretation would be that Wikipedia is a collection of joint works, where in some cases those works consist of single articles and in other cases they stretch out more widely (due to copy/paste/etc). But I don't really buy into the interpretation that each version of each article is independently created under permission of the GFDL, in part because the GFDL simply isn't being followed.
Anyway, with a joint work all joint copyright owners (anyone who has contributed copyrighted material) has "an equal right to register and enforce the copyright". [http://www.techtransfer.fsu.edu/jointownership.html]
I don't know how chinese copyright law works and international copyright law tends to get very complex very fast.
Especially when the company in question is working directly with the government in question. Hence, "good luck with that".
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