Thomas Dalton wrote:
We're wikipedia! We're the people that look at the culture of ownership and lawsuits and say "No! Free content can be as good as non-free!" We're supposed to stand for something profound. The policies could have been created so that every contributor licenses his contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation to do with what they wish and it would probably not have hurt wikipedia one bit (it certainly works well for YouTube). But we didn't! Because we're not those kind of people, that's not what we believe!
Wikipedia is released under the GDFL and not released to the public domain for a reason. If we aren't willing to enforce the terms of the GDFL, we should just release it to the public domain. We don't do that because people like to be credited for their work and very few people would contribute if people could just do whatever they like with it.
We do strongly discourage the ownership of articles, so being credited for something that has been ruthlessly edited is not the factor here. Largely, downstream users _can_ do whatever they like with the work, with only very few key restrictions. A lot of our discussions about free vs. fair use have been concerned with how Wikipedia can be used by downstream users.
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.
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.
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.
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