On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Changing the
license of every article would take a long time, but it
could be done. Changing a fraction of the articles would be even
easier.
The fraction that have only been edited by logged in and currently
active users, yes.
Those would be the absolute easiest. Others could be done with a
little more effort (especially with some code). And some would be
fairly difficult.
And that's
even if you accept your assertion that "Changing license
would require the permission of every contributor that hasn't had all
their contributions removed".
Do you question the assertion?
Yes, I do question it, but I'm not really sure, so I'm willing to
assume for the sake of the argument that this assertion is correct.
The only way you could get away with
not having someone's permission would be fair use, but that causes
problems with reusing parts of articles. While one sentence may be
fair use when used in the entire article, it might not be fair use
when used as part of just that paragraph.
I wasn't thinking of fair use. I was thinking "work of joint
authorship".