--- Vicki Rosenzweig vr@redbird.org wrote: [snip]
I'm unsure of how valid this is, legally or ethically: but I Am Not A Lawyer.
Well, the basic legal issue is this -- we don't have permission from a copyright holder to distribute something, but make a best effort to locate them and get such permission, yet never got an answer (be it "yes you can" or "no you can't"). (We also have good reason to presume that most of the people we can't trace would say yes if we could.) Suppose then one of the copyright holders we could not locate objected to our distributing the materials without their permission. We delete the offending materials, but are we still legally liable for distributing them in the first place? A relevant point here is that there is probably little difference in commercial benefit to the copyright holder between the FDL and an alternative Wikipedia-Specific License.
But chances are that, even though we said we do, we don't really use the FDL, I doubt we actually do, legally speaking. Wikipedia doesn't presently fit many of the FDL requirements, nor does it seem to me that it could easily be meshed with them. Plus people are trying to impose additionial requirments outside the FDL, which as I've argued you can't do. So I think that, even though what we say we use is the FDL, we actually are using a different license, an unwritten implied license created by Wikipedia. Similarly, the (unwritten) legal agreement created between Wikipedia and the contributors is to use this unwritten implied license. (The agreement, like the license, is a product of Wikipedia custom.)
And if we don't really use the FDL, but rather a customary unwritten license, there is nothing stopping us from writing down this customary license.
[snip] Simon
(P.S. I'm no lawyer either, but I'm applying to switch to doing law next year.)
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