Larry Sanger wrote:
So then it would be up to the individual contributors to do something about it.
This is the part that puzzles me. We don't know who the individual contributors are. The whole POINT of having Bomis (or a Nupedia Foundation) owning the copyrights is to have a clear entity with clear legal standing to sue in case of violations. You know how wikis work.
Well, presumably they know who they are, the contributors I mean. And if someone grabs some little piece of wikipedia and does something improper with it, and if that part was not ever edited by any of our regulars, then it's probably such a minor thing that going to court would be a waste of time anyway.
It's hard to imagine any sort of wholesale violation of someone taking all or even some big chunk of wikipedia (just the biographies, say) for which we couldn't rustle up _someone_ with standing.
But, you're right of course. This is one big downside of not having people explicitly assign copyright to us: it could conceivably lead to a situation where there is a violation but we can't pursue it for some reason.
We should all remember, though, that one reason the GPL has never been tested in court is that no one's ever _had_ to go that far. Community pressure can be a powerful thing. So this is all probably academic anyway.