Talthen wasn't entirely wrong but I think something was lost in translation. In a work for hire the copyright is generally lost, at least in every jurisdiction I'm familiar with. However, the moral rights may well not be.

In some jurisdictions, perhaps those Talthen is familiar with, it's not possible to transfer moral rights and they remain with the creator. In others, they can be transferred independently of the copyright. And in the US, for textual works, moral rights barely exist at all and the issue almost doesn't exist for text.

US readers are probably not very familiar with the concept of moral rights and will probably understand this better after reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights .

So, Talthen was wrong but he did incidentally point to an area where there's significant international variation in law. Whether and to what extentthis matters to the Wikipedia is uncertain but it seems possible that there's a jurisdiction where the author, regardless of any contract with the Wikipedia, could insist on their moral rights in local courts and complicate life for the Wikipedia if it had a local affiliate which could be subject to legal judgements in that jurisdiction.

But this is all really pretty peripheral to the discussion of how varying laws relating to fair use, fair dealing and such interact with the GFDL.

I'm not a lawyer; this is not legal advice; it is, though an accurate description of the law - at least, in as much as anything can be accurate for several hundred different jurisdictions/countries at once.:)

-----Original Message----- From: Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:10:05 -0800 Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say? (IP users)

talthen@wp.pl wrote:

...

Whether the writer of the text is anonymous or not should have no effect on these issues. The writer holds the copyright unless it is a work made for hire.

Writer owns the copyright forever no matter what. Even if you made smth for hire, you still owns the copyright. Copyright is smth you can't sell, can't buy, can't lose. "Copyright by John Smith" means exactly: "John Smith has made this". It's just to state the fact.

Look, I appreciate people chiming in with information, but if you don't know what you're talking about, please don't chime in as if you are speaking authoritatively. This is an unmoderated list, so you're welcome to post, but really, I think a bit of restraint is in good taste.

For the record, the stuff that talthen@wp.pl wrote is all completely wrong, and has absolutely no applicability to anything we're discussing.

And a lot of stuff that other people are writing, though I prefer not to name names, is equally speculative and wrong.

--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l