G'day Ray, Delirium, and Fred
At 02:03 AM 2/12/03 -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
I think Flexicon is the logical
defendent with Wikipedia as a the plaintiff
should we chose to not accept repeated violations of our copyright,
if
contact with them requesting compliance proves unproductive. Ulrich Fuchs
is
right to point this out but throwing in the "five author"
question is not
productive as we do want people, including commercial sites, to reuse
our
material without onerous requirements.
I'm not sure how Wikipedia could be the plaintiff, as it doesn't hold
copyright to the material. The material I've submitted to
Wikipedia, for example, is copyrighted by me. I have licensed it
under the GFDL, so Wikipedia, as well as anyone else willing to abide by
the terms of the GFDL, is free to use my text. But they have no
more rights to it than any other random person or entity does.
So if Wikipedia can't be plaintiff, and you as an individual author are
not willing to be plaintiff, then GFDL is no more than a paper tiger
since violators may copy things with impunity.
That's not the purpose of the GFDL and copyleft in general. Its purpose
is *not* to *stop* people using the content outside the GFDL, in any way.
It leaves the way open for the copyright owners to control this
themselves if they wish, but no more.
What the GFDL *does* seek to do is to guarantee that everyone *can* use
the material, provided their usage stays within the GFDL. So, if one of
these violators was to attempt to attempt to prevent Wikipedia or any
other user from using this material within the GFDL, hopefully this
attempt would be laughed out of court. Those are the teeth the GFDL seeks
to have.
So are the cases cited violations of the GFDL at all? Probably not,
IANAL. They seem to be violations of copyright, not copyleft. That is,
these sites aren't using the material under the GFDL, true, but they
don't claim to be. If they claim to be using is "courtesy of
Wikipedia" but are outside the GFDL, probably we could make them
take that notice off, as Wikipedia hasn't given any such permission and
probably doesn't have any right to give it anyway. But we can't make them
stop using the material, or to put on a GFDL notice or any other notice,
as Wikimedia doesn't own the copyright.
Even if they are copyright violations I suspect it would be very hard for
anyone to prosecute such violations with regard to anything done on a
Wiki. There's both the practical problem of getting the plaintifs
together and the theoretical one of what permission is implicit whenever
you participate in a Wiki. Mind you, US law is 'way ahead of Australian
law in class actions and the like, and so there may even be a way around
the practical problems.
Is that any clearer? IANAL as I said.
Andrew A
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andrewa @ alder . ws
http://www.zeta.org.au/~andrewa
Phone 9441 4476
Mobile 04 2525 4476
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