I was under the impression that the WMF does hold a copyright over the entirety of a particular Wikipedia as they offer that collection for download. And re-users often use these dumps as seeds for their "illegal" re-use.
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/1/8 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
Another question: Given the WMF admission in the FAQ that the GFDL has * never* been followed in re-use of Wikipedia content due to the insane difficulty of doing so, and given its rampant "illegal" re-use on the
web,
and the WMF's ignoring this illegal re-use for years on end, what chance
is
there that a court of law would find that the GFDL actually applies to
this
content were someone to sue a re-user?
Isn't it true that the efforts to force re-users to appropriately
atrribute
the content have not actually asked them to follow the letter of the
GFDL?
Is a license that is never enforced truly a license, in the legal sense?
The license is between the author and the re-user, the fact that the WMF has tolerated it being violated is irrelevant. You can lose a trademark by not defending it, but I don't think the same applies to copyrights, so unless the individual owner can be shown to have said it was all right not to follow the license to the letter, I don't see why they can't sue. (IANAL, YMMV, BBQ)
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