On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)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(a)gmail.com