Here's my view: by submitting your article to wikipedia, you keep the copyright. Bomis
does not own the copyright
to any article (except maybe the ones written by Bomis employees), just like Linus
Torvalds does not own the copyright to parts
of the Linux kernel he did not write.
What you do if you hit the submit button on wikipedia is to release your material under
GFDL, without invariant sections.
Bomis owns a copyright on the collection, just like RedHat owns a copyright on the whole
Linux distribution they sell.
So if somebody copies the website, simply changes all "Wikipedia" to
"Yahoopedia" and publishes it,
keeping individual articles under GFDL,, Bomis could
sue; individual authors could not because none of their rights were violated. If Yahoo
wants to publish a Yahoopedia,
they would have to suck the individual GFDL articles individually, and then build a
website out of it. Nobody could sue
them for it, just like nobody can sue Suse for starting a new Linux distribution out of
available GPL material. Of course,
Yahoo, when publishing their Yahoopedia, would have to follow the prescriptions of the
GFDL under which the articles
were released; in particular, they have to release their modifications under GFDL and have
to allow others to suck the
articles from their website in easily modifiable form. If they don't, individual
authors could sue them. Bomis could not sue,
since none of their right were violated. Analogy: if somebody publishes a proprietary
version of emacs, RMS could sue
but Redhat could not.
There is however one issue: if I release my article to wikipedia under GFDL, Bomis, *per
the GFDL, section 4B*, has to
maintain information about at least five of the principal authors. I think the easiest way
to do this would be to maintain unlimited
page histories, maybe downloadable by FTP somewhere if the material gets to voluminous for
the web server.
Axel
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