On 26/03/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Indeed. If Citizendium are to be sued over this, it would be a class action suit brought by a large number of Wikipedians.
Ahahaha, no it wouldn't have to be. Any individual whose copyright in their written text was violated would have a cause for action. Imagine 1000 separate DMCA notices to a violator and their host.
The fact that Citizendium are specifically talking about trying to make sure we can't use their work but they can use ours goes against the spirit of the GDFL and Wikipedia (which is all about collaboration), and that may well piss of enough Wikipedians to make a class action suit viable (it doesn't really take many, as long as one of them can afford a good lawyer).
It's unlikely to happen that way, I would hope - CZ's intentions aren't to do evil. I have a CZ login and I last used it to fix an image attribution (sufficient for the terms of both GFDL and CC-by 1.0). It depends if those who appear primarily motivated by messing with Wikipedia can be held back from massive copyright violation to that end.
According to Wikipedia, the minimum statutory damages are $200 per work (and that's assuming Citzendium can claim good faith, which would seem unlikely, in which case it's $750). What counts as a work? Each edit counting as a separate work would seem unlikely. Each article counting as a separate work would seem more likely, but how does the money get divided up between contributors?
Statutory damages under US law require registering one's copyright. That can be done diff by diff, much as IBM registers each of its Linux kernel contributions. Note that people outside the US, like me, can still send valid DMCA notices to US hosting entities.
- d.