>> So then it would be up to the individual contributors to do
>> something about it.
>This is the part that puzzles me. We don't know who the individual
>contributors are. The whole POINT of having Bomis (or a Nupedia
>Foundation) owning the copyrights is to have a clear entity with
>clear legal standing to sue in case of violations. You know how
>wikis work.
Unfortunately, we don't have much choice in the matter. If we
required authors to assign their copyrights to, say, Nupedia
Foundation, then we wouldn't be able to use work from other
open-content copyrighted sources, because our authors wouldn't
have the right to reassign those. I wouldn't, for example,
have been able to upload my optimized version of Cunc's logo,
because I neither owned the copyright to it nor was it public
domain. The current upload page text actually prevents me from
uploading it (which I pointed out at the time). I was a licensee
of that content, using it in accordance with Cunc's GFDL grant,
to make a derivative work and make that available to Wikipedia,
another licensee.
Jimbo's right: only the original content creators own the
copyrights to individual articles. In most cases, that will
be a group, and in some cases that will be hard to us to find.
If someone infringes an individual article or small group of
articles, only the author has legal standing to sue. Bomis
could do something like make an announcement that it has found
a case, and ask for the authors to step forward, but it has no
direct standing. If Bomis announces that, say, someone has
printed a math textbook with substantial pieces of text from
Wikipedia articles, then we'd have to ask (and perhaps search
through archives) to find authors. Alex wouldsay "I wrote
this paragraph, and this one..."; Ruth would say "I wrote that
article, and I think Magnus reorganized it.", etc. /They/
would either sue, or transfer their copyright at that point
as Jimbo suggests. On the other hand, if someone published
my Poker articles as a book, I could easily identify myself as
the primary author, but I would choose not to sue because my
stuff is public domain, and Bomis has no right to interfere
with that.
Bomis /does/ have standing to sue for infringement of the
collection as a whole, but otherwise Bomis is a licensee of the
articles, not a copyright holder.
Nupedia might want to be different, and more formally request
authors to assign their copyrights like FSF does.
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