[Foundation-l] GFDL and relicensing

geni geniice at gmail.com
Thu Nov 22 20:31:24 UTC 2007


On 22/11/2007, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Mike Godwin wrote:
> >
> > ... but I think as a practical matter this is not a problem, because
> > you'd have to find a copyright-holding Wikipedian in Germany who (a)
> > doesn't want to relicense, and (b) would prefer to spend money on
> > litigation rather than simply withdraw his or her contributions (from
> > Wikipedia, not from any other venue that is using the content
> > consistent with older GFDL versions) .  And even if you could find
> > someone for whom both (a) and (b) are true, the fact that WMF would
> > likely withdraw the contributions anyway if litigation were even
> > hinted at would go a long way towards building a legal defense for WMF
> > in such a case.
> >
> Mike, you may have noticed that this list includes some people who would
> treat the most improbable of circumstances as though they were everyday
> occurrences. :-)
>
> Ec
>

Mostly because due to the shear number of uploads we get 10,000 to 1
problems turn up every few weeks. Try dealing with our image uploads
from new users for any length of time and you will soon find you need
a detailed knowledge of:

IP law of every major country (copyright, Freedom of panorama,
trademark, bizarre one off stuff (DMCA copy protection stuff,
Olympics))
Inheritance law
What exactly constitutes work for hire (politicians offices are
experts at causing issues with this one)
Technically trespass law but I think we decided that was the uploader's problem.

-- 
geni



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