[WikiEN-l] GFDL lawsuits - who can sue?

On 5/15/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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] Especially when the company in question is working directly with the government in question. Hence, "good luck with that". Anthony