On 7/4/06, Michael R. Irwin michael_irwin@verizon.net wrote:
Anthony wrote:
snip
This paragraph is somewhat contradictory, but it does explicitly say that trademark law does not prevent giving Wikimedia credit for the work by name.
If my understanding of the FDL is correct, then the publisher must at least provide a pointer back to the original authors and perhaps must list all of the authors in the published materials somewhere.
What would the Wikimedia Foundation's reaction be if the material were published without giving any credit to the Foundation or the original authors?
Yes, this is all very unclear. Hopefully Brad Patrick can start tackling this in the near future, so that there can be an official statement as to what copyright interest, if any, the Wikimedia Foundation claims on content, and if they claim any, then how they intend the GFDL to be applied to such content. It would also be nice to once and for all answer the question as to whether or not Wikimedia claims to be the "publisher" as the term is used in the GFDL.
Of course this likely only solves a small sliver of the problem, as every individual contributor *also* holds a copyright interest in the content. One can hope that a court would consider Big Cats (for instance) to be a joint work, in which case permission only need to be granted by a single contributor, but it's quite up in the air whether or not that is true.
Anthony