David Gerard wrote:
On 03/01/80, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote
I have always maintained that Wikipedia editors should be implicitly appointing WMF as their non-exclusive agent whenever they edit. This would give WMF standing to go after people who violate those copyrights when ever it deems it appropriate. Most important is the viral nature of the material, and the way his carries through several generations of publication. It is noteworthy in this regard, when liability is involved, that insurance companies will pay a claim while reserving the right to recover from the person who is responsible for the damages.
In practice it's not onerous because Wikipedia editors have so far been pretty free and easy with reuse of their work. "Use our stuff! Just release your changes too!"
Sure. And this last point is the problematic one. It is not just a matter of what the first user does. Through successive generations of uncredited changes the material risks losing its viral nature. By insisting on proper credits and the application of the licence to modified works we can better expand the corpus of free material throughout the various modifications which lead to a result quite dissimilar from the originally licensed material.
Remember that free software and free content licenses are, in this context, defences by people who are reusing the stuff, against a theoretical insane or vindictive copyright owner
These licences are still conditional on a flow through of the licences. I am more concerned with the people who wrongly claim copyrights on material that is not copyrightable.
The public domain is part of the "res publica", and that kind of means that the "republic" should be protecting what belongs to the public. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for them to understand that.
heh.
Sorry if the subtleties of my thinking aren't recognizable. To me "public domain" means that it belongs to everybody rather than nobody. Whose responsibility is it to protect what belongs to everybody from usurpation by some profit motivated individual or company?
We should be enforcing our claims in selected appropriate cases, but the way we use the GFDL has made this very difficult or nearly impossible without action being taken by individual editors.
It's a lot easier with images, which tend to (a) have a single named creator (b) just get reused without much if any transformation. A case like this, with a line of text written by an IP number a few years and many edits ago ... As I said, asking Nokia nicely for an acknowledgement note is about 100% more likely to get us something beneficial to the project and to free content :-)
Absolutely! Often a little quiet shaming can be more effective than a silly and ostentatious lawsuit.
Ec