[Foundation-l] License dangers

[Thomas R. Koll]

On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 11:44:28AM -0700, Mark Horner wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am new to your list and browsed the archives briefly. I have a concern 
> related to the FDL. A little background first - I started a project ( 
> http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst ) to do something similar to wikibooks but 
> not quite as general. We think we'll just upload our books into 
> wikibooks when we are done.

> I guess that wikipedia could just remove content that is queried by 
> someone who claims to have the copyright. Is this what you plan to do 
> if such a problem arises? I realise that it is clear what license you 
> are using etc. but who takes the fall if some commits something they 
> don't hold the copyright to?

You mean anonymous edits where you only see the IP?
It's hard to prove that you were the one who had this or that IP
at this or that time. AND you must have read the disclaimers on the
edit page because they are too obvious to be overread.
But, it's a very different thing if someone copied content from a 
foreign work into wikipedia, we at de: use 
http://www.affenkrieger.de/wiki/wikicc.php to search for copyright violations.
If we find a copyvio we often just delete it, sometimes it's worth the
time to write to the original author and ask for the content to
be released under GNU FDL.


> Our real concern is that we want to actually print books and raising 
> money is hard enough. We don't want to risk printing the books again if 
> something came up. (The quick answer is to write everything ourselves 
> but thats also the slowest answer and we'd like to act as decisively as 
> possible too.)

Before you print the book you should have a revision period where you check
for copyVios (on de: we've started WikiReaders[1] and normaly I don't do extra
checks because we're quite good and finding CopyVios) and controll the
content more than once.
Drop a mail if you're going to print the books, I've done my first one
this month and might help you a bit. Also we have a shop [2] that is
meant to evolve to the central market place.

After you seem to be from South Africa you also might to chat with Jimbo
Wales because he wants to distribute Wikipedia on CD bundled to any kind
of PC especially in Africa[3] and also contact Magnus who works on the
"Wikipedia on DVD" project[4].

ciao, tom

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiReader
[2] http://shop.wikipedia.org and http://meta.wikipedia.org/Webshop
[3] http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-May/010068.html
[4] http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-May/010066.html
-- 
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* http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
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