Anthony writes:
Even Mike Godwin seemed to recognize this principle in his early discussions on the topic, when he suggested that there would be a way to opt-out of the relicensing. But my single question which I presented for the FAQ was left unanswered. How can I opt out?
My suggestion that editors might choose to opt out was informed by my strong belief that only a very editors would even want to. Contributions to wiki projects are already subject to an immense amount of merger and conflation with other people's contributions, but I suppose if anyone really felt that the copyrights in *his particular edits* were being used in a way that violated his intent to license them freely for others to use, that that person probably would feel strongly enough to review some or all of his edits and remove them. Obviously, anyone that passionate about this issue will have the energy to do this. My expressed view was that we not stand in such a person's way.
Brian writes:
Is a license that is never enforced truly a license, in the legal sense?
Sure. The fact that GFDL attribution requirements have never been strictly followed on Wikipedia does not entail that somehow the GFDL has vanished or doesn't apply. A more lawyerly interpretation of the facts would be to understand that contributors have some pretty strict rights to attribution under the (earlier) GFDL that they don't enforce. A right in copyright that a rights-holder chooses not to enforce does not normally evaporate for that reason.
Alex writes:
There probably aren't many offline reusers because they're either entirely non-compliant and we have no idea that they exist or they want to be compliant, read the terms of the GFDL, and decide not to bother with our content.
This is absolutely one of the problems this license-harmonization effort is trying to address. (Another, obviously, is to move towards a licensing approach that reflects Wikipedia's actual practice.)
Thomas Dalton writes:
I'm not sure Mike was thinking clearly when he said that - I don't see any way someone that has made a significant number of edits could opt-out. The work required in tracing what parts of what articles are derivative of your edits would make removing your edits infeasible, so every article you've edited would have to remain under only GFDL, which dramatically reduces the usefulness of the changeover. And that's before we consider articles that have been merged and other means by which text is moved from one article to another.
I *think* I was thinking clearly -- I didn't mean to suggest that it would be trivial for an editor massively concerned about the changeover to remove all his or her edits. Obviously, for some editors it would be practically impossible. For others it might be possible, and for still others removal of a few edits or articles might be all the editor really wants to do.
But I was actually trying to draw some attention to the fact that claiming copyright interests in particular *edits*, while theoretically valid under copyright law, are close to absurd in practical terms. Leaving aside the cases where editors made substantial additions (or even drafted whole articles) -- the easiest cases in other words -- I would think that most of the editors who so radically object to the license harmonization that they want to leave Wikipedia altogether would be satisfied by opting out of making further contributions. I'm not sanguine about that prospect -- I would prefer that they continue on as editors -- but the unwieldiness and compatibility problems created by our current licensing scheme are a much bigger problem than that, and a much bigger threat to our mission.
--Mike
I *think* I was thinking clearly -- I didn't mean to suggest that it would be trivial for an editor massively concerned about the changeover to remove all his or her edits. Obviously, for some editors it would be practically impossible. For others it might be possible, and for still others removal of a few edits or articles might be all the editor really wants to do.
I guess if you leave it up to the editor to do it themselves, it could work, although it would still require someone to go along after them fixing the mess that would inevitably result from removing random chunks from the middle of articles. There would also be disputes over how much should be removed - can you remove a word because you corrected the spelling of it? (probably not) can you remove an entire sentence because it's an expansion of a sentence that you wrote? (probably, since there isn't an alternative, but that's going to really piss off the person that did all the work expanding it) And then you have to deal with disputes over whether the text that is put in to replace the removed chunks is sufficiently different so as not to infringe on the editor's copyright. I think it would end up being a lot of work for more than just the editor in question.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org