On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
2009/2/9 Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>rg>:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/7 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
Anyone can take any idiot question to court. That
doesn't count as a
reason to assume that there must therefore be a substantive reason to
believe that the "or later" language doesn't apply. Nor does being
unable to prove a negative.
I don't understand what you are trying to say. Some people have
indicated that certain jurisdictions have laws against "or later"
clauses. Experts in the laws of these jurisdictions should be asked to
determine the truth.
At the very least, it seems to empirically not be a problem.
The GPL has
included the "or later" language since it was first published in 1989,
and has since gone through two updates (the first in 1991), without, as
far as I can find, a single ruling invalidating that language. And
GPL-licensed stuff has *much* more extensive worldwide commercial reuse
than Wikimedia content does.
Have any of the updates been as drastic as the latest? Was there
anything in the previous updates that anyone would be likely to object
to?
Put another way, has there ever been a case which validated the concept? In
what jurisdictions?
I highly doubt there is a case where a company has successfully defended
against a prima facie case of copyright infringement based on a non-explicit
click-through agreement between the author and a third party, the agreement
which allegedly licenses the work under a license which doesn't yet exist at
the time of the agreement and which later claims to allow republication
under a different license which also doesn't yet exist at the time of the
agreement.
Thus, the doubt.
But feel free to try to connect the dots more clearly than I just did. If
Wikimedia goes through with a board resolution to allow this relicensing,
you claim that every company in the world has a license to use my
contributions from 2005 under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported. Please explain.