Neil Harris wrote:
> The content belongs to its original copyright owners, and increasingly,
> the Wikimedia Foundation is their official copyright agent.
Please avoid statements like this, as they are potentially misleading.
While it is theoretically possible that at some point in the future, the
Foundation might take legal action against people who misuse content
taken from Wikimedia in violation of the licensing terms, contributors
do not assign their copyrights to the Foundation, and the Foundation
does not assume a duty to protect these rights. The sense in which the
Foundation is an official agent for copyright issues (actually the agent
is Jimbo personally) is with respect to third parties who have
complaints about their copyrighted material being infringed by use on
Wikimedia projects.
There is some language in [[en:Wikipedia:Submission Standards]] about
appointing the Foundation as an agent for downstream copyright
compliance issues. That page is a draft, most of it now more than a year
old, and has never been adopted as official policy. As things currently
stand, contributors have every right to enforce their own copyrights
against outside parties as they see fit, and don't need for the
Foundation to get involved.
--Michael Snow