On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Alex R. wrote:
And what about copyright infringements, privacy right violations and defamation that his hidden in the page history. If this is all released under the GFDL and Wikipedia has no warranty disclaimers (which are allowed under the GFDL) then doesn't Wikipedia have liability for allowing such wrongful texts to be distributed further?
Where such things exist (that is, where the FDL license was never valid because the copyright owner didn't agree and fair use is not clear, or where the material violated the [explicit? implicit?] terms of use of the site and were thus unacceptable to Wikipedia in the first place), the revisions in question should be withdrawn from distribution -- that is, removed from the 'old' table so they are no longer distributed by Wikipedia on the web and in public database dumps.
Please provide a list of any such revisions you are aware of so this can be done.
The suggestion that older revisions are no longer under the FDL is completely incomprehensible to me. They are a part of Wikipedia. They were provided to Wikipedia under the FDL and no other terms. We therefore cannot distribute them under any other terms, but are free to distribute them under the FDL. What else could they be?
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't make any sense to me. Are bookstores forbidden from selling the first edition of a book after the second edition is released? Is Linux 2.2 contraband because Linux 2.4 is available and now I have to contract separately with every contributor to Linux 2.2 if I want to use the slimmer older version for an embedded device with limited memory? There's no expiration date on the license. (Besides the expiration date of the copyright, of course!)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)