[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd certainly ask for advice from counsel on this, but I would want to
> know: "given that Baidupedia is starting with GFDL content, does the
> fact that they obscure that their content is licensed under the GFDL
> prevent all subsequent derivative edits from also being unknowingly
> licensed under the GFDL?"
>
> Essentially, if you are making a derivative work of a viral/share-
> alike/GFDL style content, but you do not know what the status of the
> original was (and did not agree to license your content under the
> GFDL), what is the copyright status of the newly created derivative
> work?
>
> We'd need to know the answer to that question before doing a "reverse
> Baidupedia". If the answer is "It's under the GFDL" then we're ok to
> proceed (ignoring for a second the moral issues). If the answer is
> something other than that, we may not be able to do it.

In contract terms, this seems like a classic failure of meeting of the
minds - if the secondary contributor is unaware of the original
license on the material, then they cannot have agreed to the license,
and likely cannot be held to it.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com