George Herbert wrote:
On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Dan Rosenthal 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.
Perhaps one of our Chinese speakers can explain just what Baidu claims for copyright. If they purport to retain it for themselves, and deny any rights to their own contributors it may be that the rights of those contributors are not legally relevant. It strikes me as unlikely that they would have any scheme in place that recognizes any rights for their contributors.
Dan makes a good point about legal counsel. A responsible Board member needs to give closer scrutiny to legal implications before moving from proposal to implementation. Even then, legal advice is not completely binding. Reading and literally applying statutes in isolation from their context can produce bizarre results. Case law and the probability of adverse effects also play a role, as does the collective tolerance of the Board for what could happen.
In a mailing-list discussion we need to explore all possibilities. A premature determination that something is illegal or won't work closes the opportunity to follow that less travelled road that everyone has been overlooking. NPOV discussions are often best resolved by looking for that alternative wording that will make both sides happy.
While the moral arguments need to be considered we should not extend them to the point of self-righteousness. For now we don't have a strong enough factual framework to derive a meaningful moral conclusion.
Ec