On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 8:12 PM, Ting Chen
<Wing.Philopp(a)gmx.de> wrote:
It is an
issue of the individuals, because they are the ones whose
rights have been breached.
This is not that easy. If I contribute for the GNU projects and a company
comes and takes the part of code I contributed, builds it in its own
software and claim it to be its own property. It is my right that is
breached, yes. But the FSF would take the intrest of the project and sue the
company.
IANAL, but how exactly can they sue them if they don't own the copyright
(resp. patent rights or whatever) to the software?
Are you suggesting that the WMF takes 'mandates' from individual WM
contributors to sue on behalf of them? This would probably mean that a
fund/endowment for 'the legal defense of the moral rights of Wikimedia
contributors" would need to be created...
"Agent" or "mandate" would come to roughly the same thing. I'm
not a
big supporter of the idea of legal defence funds. Ironically, I believe
that defending our view could be done more cheaply without it. Donors
are likely to be more generous with a Foundation that has the guts to
exercise its rights when it doesn't have the money in the bank for it.
The moral rights argument would likely be very weak in the United
States. While US copyright law does pay lip service to moral rights it
does not penalize violations of moral rights. We might do better with
questions around who protects the rights of the public, or breach of
contract -- perhaps even in a class action suit. A lot of this is
untrodden ground, so it's difficult to say where our most effective
argument would lie. A little imagination would help.
Ec