On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 10:03:38PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
Arvind Narayanan wrote:
Ironically, the bulk of [[Chest strategy and tactics]] was written by me and is therefore in the public domain.
I don't understand. Could you please explain how your contributions are PD? The edit pages say: "Please note that all contributions to Wikipedia are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License". Do you mean to say that you've also put it up at some other site as PD? Even in that case, chessandbeyond copied it from wikipedia, and so they're still bound by the terms of the GFDL.
They're only bound by the terms of the GFDL if the text was copyrighted in the first place. If the author released it into the public domain before putting it on Wikipedia, Wikipedia cannot add additional restrictions to it. He doesn't have to have published it somewhere else, just to make a statement, "I disclaim copyright interest in any of the works I have submitted to Wikipedia" or something similar. If it's
OK.
edited, the derived work can then be copyrighted and therefore GFDL'd --
It certainly looks like a derived work; looking at the page history there are authors with significant contributions other than Prof. Boldt.
In any case, it does not affect the overall claim of copyright violation, since they have copied about a dozen articles.
Arvind
but the mere fact that they got it from Wikipedia doesn't mean it's GFDL'd if it's a verbatim text in the public domain. As a similar example, if someone came and copied some of our public domain poems (say, [[Invictus]]), the fact that they got them from Wikipedia would not oblige them to follow the GFDL, because we have no copyright on them.
-Mark
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