The Hooded Man wrote:
On Behalf Of Gregory Maxwell
Perhaps it will, but the foundation will not be able steal credit from the actual authors of the works in Wikipedia for itself, at least not without a legal fight. Most quality works in Wikipedia are the work of a small number of authors per work, not these massively collaborative efforts as has been misrepresented to the free software foundation.
I think the point is:
1.) Do you think Wikimedia would do this?
That's a strange question. Probably the current Board would not, but one must always be open to the possibility that it could happen with some future Board. Yhr huge market value would be very tempting. A person that is so minded can afford the patience to take whatever number of years would be needed to put himself in the position to be able to do this. Believing that it could never happen is one way od insuring that it does happen.
2.) They would not be able to do this. A legal fight would be stupid; database dumps are publicly available that clearly show full author history.
If Wikimedia wanted to steal the articles, they could delete the entire edit history and remove it from all database dumps. But then people would still have them. It's impossible for them to do that.
The legal fight would be the least of their worries. Who would defend the rights of the individual authors? On one side you have an individual with clear vested interests, a chance to make big money, and prospects attractive enough to hire legal help on a contingency basis. On the other side is a large collective assortment of loosely connected authors who do not lose any money by letting go of rights that would be very expensive to defend.
I agree that any single work may be the product of a small number of authors, but someone who is after bigger game can easily abandon specific articles without any effect on his bottom line. The big copyright fight of the future is unlikely to be over Wikipedia's infringement of the copyright of others; we have a history of building and continually improving mechanisms for dealing with that. The big fight will be when someone else takes the GFDL material and unrepentedly tries to claim copyright for himself. Who will be there to defend the rights of our individual authors? What individual will be able to defend his rights in what could be a very complex lawsuit? In the absence of an organization (perhaps the Foundation) which can be named a collective agent for all our authors (or at least most of them) I don't see how such a defense can happen.
3.) There is nothing that can be legally "stolen". By writing an article, the authors have released their work under the GFDL.
This naïvely misses the point. It's true enough, but there is a difference between a licence and putting material into the public domain. The underlying principle and condition of the licence is that there will be a chain of people who will successively apply this licence. The person who breaks that chain is the one who violates the GFDL. What CAN anybody do about it?
Let's not get into conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories have nothing to do with this.
Ec