On 9/10/07, Axel Boldt axelboldt@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
as we do not have to resort to a legally risky move
I guess that's what it boils down to: how legally risky is my proposition? Granted that I don't have any experience in these matters; I just find it hard to believe that a person could
- prove that they own the copyright to some Wikipedia content
- convince a jury that they never heard about the opt-out offer
- claim that the license change caused damages larger than their
legal costs.
3 is the only particularly unlikely one. But change 3 into getting an injunction and the value might be high enough for the right individuals. Think SCO vs. IBM, only with SCO having a rock-solid legal case.
And when you consider how many mirrors there are out there, and multiply by the number of articles the person bringing the suit might have, the statutory damages alone might be big enough to make it worthwhile.
If such whimsical lawsuits are indeed a possibility, then the danger of action should be weighed against the danger of inaction: right now, any past contributor could sue for violating GFDL 4.A, failing to change an article's title after modification. I just don't see how suits like that are viable.
That is a particularly hard one to fix, and the draft GFDL 2.0 only makes it worse. But changing the license to CC-BY-SA and doing nothing are not the only two choices.