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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
en:User:UninvitedCompany has a user page which contains text with a form much like a standard copyright grant, which makes the claim that because wikipedia or it's articles are a collective work by many authors that any contributor, no matter how minor (as his less than 3k edits are quite minor compared to the size of wikipedia as a whole which he lays claim to), is entitled to relicense the work as a whole under any license they see fit. He then goes on to use this to grant the entire wikipedia under CC-BY-SA because he has issues with the GFDL. Although he has been careful to pad his words with the expected IANALs, it is pretty clear his intention is to circumvent the licensing of Wikipedia and, failing that, to encourage others to disregard our licensing.
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So I'd like to ask the community at large to please ask uninvited company to revise his user page. I don't think his claim has any more merit than pioneer12's disagreement with the form he submitted all his talk text through, but I think it's all the more negative because it purports to effect the licensing of work by authors other than him rather than just his own.
While your insistence on the GFDL is admirable, I (and IANAL) feel that the user page of UninvitedCompany does not present the same problems as that of User:Pioneer-12, because UnivitedCompany is *not* saying that they are refusing to license under the GFDL.
As I see it (and again, IANAL), the statement on [[User:UninvitedCompany]] (as of 04:25, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)), says:
1. I have contributed to Wikipedia 2. Wikipedia is NOT a collection, but a single work (which, IMHO, is contrary to consensus) 3. Wikipedia is a single work with joint authorship (again, contrary to consensus) 4. Since Wikipedia is a single work, any author can license it however they want, the rest of Wikipedia be damned (which is against the GFDL) 5. I hereby multi-license my contributions under CC-BY-SA 1.0 and 2.0 6. IANAL so anything in 1-4 must be taken with a very large grain of salt, and people should check before the distribute material 7. This is a statement of intent, not a contract.
The problems I see are in the status of Wikipedia as being a single work rather than a collection of works; and the right of a single user (namely UnivitedCompany) to change the license of the entire Wikipedia by simply saying that they want their contributions to be under the Creative Commons licenses.
Now if I've read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multi-licensing correctly (and again, IANAL), All Wikipedia articles are licensed under the GFDL, and only the portions written by authors who have multi-licensed under CC/BSD/whatever are licensed under those alternative licenses. So (and again, IANAL): your contributions cannot be licensed under anything except the GFDL unless you choose to do so, and even then, *they are still under the GFDL*.
- -- Alphax OpenPGP key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/cc9up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis