On 11/20/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer(a)wordzen.net> wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Read clause 9 of the GFDL: "You may not
copy, modify, sublicense, or
distribute the Document except as expressly provided for under this
License. Any other attempt to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute
the Document is void, and will automatically terminate your rights
under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or
rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses
terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance."
Wikimedia distributes the Document other than as expressly provided
for under the GFDL, and has already had its rights under the GFDL
terminated.
Wikipedia's use of the GFDL is already absurd. If you want to make
any sense of things you have to look beyond the GFDL.
Anthony
Under clause 9 aren't we already in breach of the license due to the
fact that many things on wikipedia are multi licensed and despite our
best efforts the licenses don't always match up with each other totally?
-Jtkiefer
Probably not for that reason. Aggregating GFDL content with non-GFDL
content is valid under clause 7. There are some legal grey areas
here, for instance what if a copyright violation is intertwined
directly within the text in a way that can't possibly be considered a
separate work.
The most important point of non-compliance on the site itself is the
lack of a title page listing five principal authors and the name of
the publisher. There is also the lack of a copyright notice within
the document (although one could argue that the entire project is a
single document with the copyright notice as part of
[[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]), and a less than compliant section entitled
history (the wiki feature doesn't state the title or the publisher).
The history section becomes completely unacceptable whenever anything
is copied or moved from one page to another. To go further into it
I'd really have to hear a proposal over what is considered the
document, what is the history section, where is the title page, etc.
There are a few different ways you could try to shoehorn these things
into Wikipedia, but I don't see how any of them could be considered
"as expressly provided for" by the GFDL. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong,
and there's a way to look at Wikipedia so that everything fits. If
so, it'd be really nice if someone would explain it all. What are the
documents? Where are the title pages? What are the titles? Has
permission been given to use the same titles? Where are the sections
entitled history? Where are the copyright notices? Who are the
publishers? I can come up with possible answers to all of these
separately, which come close to compliance, but then the different
answers invariably contradict each other. Is the document everything?
All the text? Is each article a document? Is Wikimedia the
publisher? A publisher?
Perhaps the most blantant offender is the current database dump. That
doesn't even contain a *mention* of all the authors, let alone a
compliant title page and history section. It's clearly distribution
outside of what is "expressly provided for" by the GFDL.
All of this is really just a mental exercise unless it actually comes
down to a lawsuit. And then the doctrines of laches and maybe even
abandonment would come into play (plus fair use, implicit license, and
OCILLA). But in terms of Wikimedia, I really don't see how the GFDL
could be used as a defense, it just isn't being followed very closely.