On 11/19/05, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/19/05, Andre Engels
<andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2005/11/19, Michael Crouch
<creidieki(a)gmail.com>om>:
I'm trying to improve the English Wikipedia's documentation on article
moves, and I had a GFDL question. I hope this is the right place;
feel free to point me elsewhere.
Articles on En are often split in a cut-and-paste way, with material
from one article removed and put into another article. None of the
documentation (that I can find) mentions anything about maintaining
the necessary authorship information.
I've been told several times (on [[Wikipedia:Help desk]] and
[[Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)]]) to simply mention in the edit
summary "This material moved from [[Foo]]". Is this adequate for the
GFDL requirements? I know we might not have a perfect solution to
this, but I didn't want to add anything to the documentation without
making sure it was correct.
Simply speaking: No, it is not enough according to the GNU/FDL, but
Wikipedia is interpreting the GNU/FDL so freely anyway that adding this to
it does not differ much either.
Wikipedia has no legal right to "interpet the GFDL", when people save
text they give permission to use the text under a certain license, and
if you don't follow that license you're guilty of copyright
infringement.
I think you'd have a tough time convincing a judge to rule that an ISP
is "guilty of copyright infringment" for simply hosting the content
which you provide for it to host. Wikipedia isn't following the GFDL,
and it should be, but to say it's committing copyright infringment is
a different story entirely.
There is a difference here between simply hosting your content,
hosting it with modifications, copying it to a different part of
Wikipedia, and copying it to an entirely different project. The first
is pretty obviously legal. The second is more questionable, and you
could argue that you have a right to revoke the permission (certainly
upon any violation of the GFDL which is ongoing). The last two are
even more legally shaky, but there are plenty of arguments that it is
legal even outside the GFDL.
Anthony