On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 18:26:17 +0100, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
The *section* itself would be a derived work. But would the *changes*? If that's the case, copyright law is more stupid than I thought. If I take a copyrighted work and add my own ending to it, does that mean that later I cannot use that ending on an independent work?
It's more stupid than you thought: We have wholly original works (fan fictions) being ruled as derived works because they use the same fictional universe.
This type of reasoning isn't applied that often outside of things like fan fiction because it's very difficult to prove that something was derived in most cases, but it would be much easier in the case of wikipedia.
Some cases are difficult; some are not. No need to throw away all.
I agree but I believe the space of cases that are difficult may be much larger and much more difficult to define with precision than you suspect.