I was not clear. Those who wrote content would have standing to sue, as would Bomis, because the writers own the copyright to the texts, and Bomis owns the copyright to the collection.
-----Original Message----- From: Larry Sanger To: Mark Christensen Cc: ''wikipedia-l@nupedia.com' ' Sent: 2/6/02 7:11 PM Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Copyrights
Now, Jimbo, do you agree with that? It's "those who wrote the content" who would have the legal standing to sue if, for example, Microsoft were to make an altered version of Wikipedia and try to copyright and sell it?
On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Mark Christensen wrote:
I want to publically apologize, I intended that last message to go
directly
to Larry, not to the list. I'll try to discuss the issue with Larry
offline
untill we at least both understand what the other is trying to say.
Also, I agree, the issue of concensus is clearly of secondary
importance to
understanding what acutally is the case, regardless of what anybody
thought
in the past.
In the mean time, let me answer Larry's question briefly.
I don't think anybody could sucessfully sue, because we have a strong argument that the wikipedians page fulfills the FDL authorship
requirement.
But it would be the copyright holders (those who wrote content) who
would
have the legal standing to sue if there were in fact an actuall
violation.
Yours Mark
-----Original Message----- From: Larry Sanger To: 'wikipedia-l@nupedia.com' Sent: 2/6/02 6:35 PM Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Copyrights
I don't see that there has been the consensus you mention. Frankly, I don't care if there has been, because I'm not arguing with you, I'm asking for clarification, for pete's sake! Sheesh!
OK, let me put my confusion a different way, because I still don't understand:
WHO has the right to sue, and FOR WHAT do they have that right?
Larry
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Mark Christensen wrote:
I was not clear. Those who wrote content would have standing to sue, as would Bomis, because the writers own the copyright to the texts, and Bomis owns the copyright to the collection.
I think this is true only to the extent that someone does something naughty with _the collection_. If Microsoft takes an individual article from Wikipedia and modifies it and publishes it with the claim that it is proprietary and no one can redistribute it, then I think I'd have a hard time pressing a claim that they violated the copyright of our collection.
So then it would be up to the individual contributors to do something about it. Probably they could sell me the copyright for a dollar at that time, with the understanding that I'd go after the bad people in court. Or possibly various people who care about the project, including me, could put together a fund to sue.
--Jimbo
On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Jimmy Wales 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.
Larry
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.
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