[Foundation-l] The license situation

[Anthony]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 12:42 PM, John at Darkstar <vacuum at jeb.no> wrote:

> That you request a possible mgration does not solve the real issue, you
> can't relicense content you do not own. I tried to get a clear answare
> in the past if such a relicensing is considered a single sided
> renegotiation of a contract, and given the described scenario, ie
> relicensing of the Wikimedia projects, very few in Noraway are willing
> to bet on the legalty of the project. The only one I've found are
> someone deeply involved in Creative Commons, and one other person that
> guessed it might be legal if the contributors was given the opportunity
> to opt out.


The whole concept is rather sketchy, but the powers that be seem to want to
give it a try anyway.  I'm not sure I blame them, since GFDL 1.2 isn't being
followed anyway.  Under the draft text one possibility would have been to
not relicense the content but to require new contributors to dual-license
their contributions, and let third parties use the content under CC at their
own risk.  Not sure if that strategy would be possible under the new 1.3 or
not.


> Note that if one contributor opts out then all later
> revisions has to be purged.
>

That's certainly not true under US copyright law, though many people think
it is.  One of them will probably reply to this post telling me I'm wrong,
at which point I'm going to ignore them.  So don't consider my silence as
acquiescence.

Anthony