[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Anthony]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/2/9 Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>:
> > Thomas Dalton wrote:
> >> 2009/2/7 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> >>
> >>> Anyone can take any idiot question to court. That doesn't count as a
> >>> reason to assume that there must therefore be a substantive reason to
> >>> believe that the "or later" language doesn't apply. Nor does being
> >>> unable to prove a negative.
> >>>
> >>
> >> I don't understand what you are trying to say. Some people have
> >> indicated that certain jurisdictions have laws against "or later"
> >> clauses. Experts in the laws of these jurisdictions should be asked to
> >> determine the truth.
> > At the very least, it seems to empirically not be a problem. The GPL has
> > included the "or later" language since it was first published in 1989,
> > and has since gone through two updates (the first in 1991), without, as
> > far as I can find, a single ruling invalidating that language. And
> > GPL-licensed stuff has *much* more extensive worldwide commercial reuse
> > than Wikimedia content does.
>
> Have any of the updates been as drastic as the latest? Was there
> anything in the previous updates that anyone would be likely to object
> to?


Put another way, has there ever been a case which validated the concept?  In
what jurisdictions?

I highly doubt there is a case where a company has successfully defended
against a prima facie case of copyright infringement based on a non-explicit
click-through agreement between the author and a third party, the agreement
which allegedly licenses the work under a license which doesn't yet exist at
the time of the agreement and which later claims to allow republication
under a different license which also doesn't yet exist at the time of the
agreement.

Thus, the doubt.

But feel free to try to connect the dots more clearly than I just did.  If
Wikimedia goes through with a board resolution to allow this relicensing,
you claim that every company in the world has a license to use my
contributions from 2005 under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.  Please explain.