Robert Scott Horning wrote:
At the moment, however, I don't know of any
specific content for any
Wikimedia project that has had formal copyright registration occur. And
you are correct that trying to prove damages that a free project like
this would be difficult at best for any monitary amount, although I
think a judge could still come up with at least some modest amount just
to prove a point that copyright violations are wrong to do, even for
free content.
I don't know that a judge would do that. Imposing punitive damages
without legal authority is something that could be easily reversed on
appeal. The statutory damages provisions in effect are what provides
the authority. The judge then has flexibility within the numerical
boundaries in the law.
What I was trying to imply here is that a case for some damages might
still be made, even though by being made available for "free" would
certainly made such award astonishingly small compared to what you would
have gained from trying to publish content with a more conventional "all
rights reserved" copyright. The formula for determining that award
would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis and would be something
close to a nightmare for a judge to determine, or a plaintiff to present
as reasonable for copyleft content. Copyleft content does have some
restrictions, and a violation of copyleft principles can potentially
show some damage depending on how blatant of a copyright violation was
done that completely ignored the license but treated it as public domain
content instead.
Having statutory damages available would act as a much better deterant
from people who wouldn't care about any copyright infringement or
violations of the terms of a license like the GFDL. I think on this
point we are agreed.
--
Robert Scott Horning