If they (the contributor) were, or should have been on notice that the material came from Wikipedia or was under a free license, there may not be an offer/acceptance issue (Baidupedia knows or reasonably should know that they are violating the license, and if the contributor knows or should know it too, then the contract is not void for lack of acceptance, though it may be void for other reasons).
Another concern is then if the new derivative is not under the GFDL, does that give rise to copyright infringement? Or does the old content divorce itself from the new content?
We've always thought in terms of "What if a static source uses our content without attribution" but how do things change when it is a collaborative or dynamic site that uses our content without attribution?
-Dan On Jun 13, 2008, at 4:25 PM, George Herbert wrote:
On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Dan Rosenthal swatjester@gmail.com wrote:
I'd certainly ask for advice from counsel on this, but I would want to know: "given that Baidupedia is starting with GFDL content, does the fact that they obscure that their content is licensed under the GFDL prevent all subsequent derivative edits from also being unknowingly licensed under the GFDL?"
Essentially, if you are making a derivative work of a viral/share- alike/GFDL style content, but you do not know what the status of the original was (and did not agree to license your content under the GFDL), what is the copyright status of the newly created derivative work?
We'd need to know the answer to that question before doing a "reverse Baidupedia". If the answer is "It's under the GFDL" then we're ok to proceed (ignoring for a second the moral issues). If the answer is something other than that, we may not be able to do it.
In contract terms, this seems like a classic failure of meeting of the minds - if the secondary contributor is unaware of the original license on the material, then they cannot have agreed to the license, and likely cannot be held to it.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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