On 26/03/07, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
IANAL... IANAIPL.. but I read Slashdot a lot (isn't that just as good?) and I don't remember any headlines saying "Supreme court decides in favor of GPL!" Even the GPL is a bit up in the air.
Er, not really. The FSF say they regularly sort out GPL problems quietly by starting with the original premise of the license - that the *default* is all rights reserved, and that you don't have to accept the license terms, but they're the only thing making it not all rights reserved. That the GPL hasn't been through court is because only a bloody idiot would try. (The last bloody idiot to try was Daniel Wallace, and IBM is now using his tattered legal corpse to beat SCO, the second-last bloody idiot to try, over the head with.)
The GFDL works the same way. The only thing that gives you the right to reuse my contributions to Wikipedia is that I've released them under the GFDL. (I've also dual-licensed my own under any CC-by-sa licence.) No-one has to accept the licence terms for my work - but if they reuse it other than under one of the licenses, they are violating my copyright. Note - not Wikipedia's or Wikimedia's, but *mine*.
Now multiply that by a thousand.
Now, the GFDL... I don't think there's any really big, important project _except_ Wikipedia, and I don't think Wikipedia has ever engaged in any lawsuits in which the GFDL played any kind of role whatsoever. The GFDL is so legally puzzling that Wikipedia itself can't give nice, simple, crystal-clear rules on how to re-use Wikipedia content. Nobody understand what the attribution and history rules really mean and what does or does not satisfy them in practice. And none of what anyone thinks they might understand has ever been tested in court.
I think the cut'n'paste planned is pretty bloody blatant.
Who the heck is going to sue Citizendium? Nobody has a big stake in their Wikipedia contributions. There's no money involved. And so many of the issues involve other licenses being _less_ free than GFDL.
Someone pissed off enough. For one, there's the DMCA to apply.
If you strike the hornet's nest, you get to negotiate with each hornet individually.
The only way this can ever be a problem is if Jimbo decides to have Wikipedia sue Citizendium based on ego and personal spite, and I don't think he's that spiteful, and I'm not sure he could convince the Wikimedia Foundation to do it. And by golly if I ever see a banner saying "Wikimedia needs your contribution to fund its continuing legal struggle against Citizendium" you can't expect much in the way of contributions from _me._
You appear to be under the impression the copyright in question is Wikipedia's or Wikimedia's. It's not - they own hardly any of the stuff on the sites.
- d.