Robert Scott Horning
<mailto:foundation-l%40wikimedia.org?Subject=%5BFoundation-l%5D%20GFDL%20publisher%20credit&In-Reply-To=>
wrote
Ray Saintonge wrote:
If Wikimedia wants to hold a copyright interest
inthis material it needs
to be ready to defend those copyrights in a serious way. Having an
employee make ad-hoc, arbitrary and speculative pronouncements on the
law without a clear policy from the Board to back it up probably puts
the entire project into greater peril than the obvious silliness of the
more ignorant copyright violators.
Ec
The precedence that I would like to use for why the WMF should hold
copyright on Wikimedia project content is the same reason why the Free
Software Foundation holds copyright for the GNU projects: If there is a
copyright violation, they can be a legal party to enforcing the
copyright and defending the GPL.
My preference here would be to have each editor appoint WMF as a
non-exclusive agent for the purpose of taking all steps to defend
editors' copyrights. This would prevent some distant future management
from using its standing as a copyright owner to do things that can only
be done by any copyright owner. By disowning any copyrights it may have
in the material it also helps to maintain its distance from the content
if it is ever named to defend some suit based on the contents.
The same thing (I would hope) could apply to the WMF if
there is a GFDL
violation. As it stands right now, by disclaiming copyright, all the
WMF can do to enforce a flagarant copyright violation of Wikipedia
content is sit on the sidelines and act as a cheerleader. Brad would be
legally excluded from even being able to offer advise. If you are an
individual contributor and want to defend the copyright of content that
you wrote, you would have to hire your own counsel, as would each
seperate contributor who would want to join in the legal defense.
Being agent should permit WMF to act. The potential complications if
the individuals had to do everything themselves boggle the mind. There
is also the question that registration of a copyright is a prerequisite
for prosecuting any infringers. Whose responsibility is it to ensure
that all needed registrations happen?
Frankly, I think this is an ugly situation, although it
is "safe" for
the WMF and from a legal liability perspective, I do understand why the
decision to not claim copyright was done. The liability instead rests
on the individual contributors. Each time you add some content to
Wikimedia projects, particularly if you use the same account for each
contribution and are prominent in the "community", you put yourself into
harm's way legally speaking. You can be held responsible for the
content that you added, or even failed to edit out when you made a minor
change to a page. In other words, this approach to playing it safe
really is just transfering liability from the WMF to individual users.
That really should be motivation to being a major contributor to
Wikimedia projects, isn't it?
I have no problem with the idea of WMF being "safe", and that uploaders
should be legally responsible for the material they add. I really don't
agree that a person who has acted as a mere grammatical editor has
published anything substantive. Such an editor bases his entire effort
on what is there in front of him; the research needed to establish the
legality of the substance is beyond his frame of reference.
Ec