[Foundation-l] Licensing transition: opposing points of view

Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton at gmail.com
Sat Mar 21 00:57:36 UTC 2009


2009/3/21 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
> On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think the percentages given as plausible, but do we really have 10
>> million contributors? The English Wikipedia apparently has 9,237,657
>> registered users, but I believe a very large proportion of them have
>> never made an edit, an even larger proportion won't have any edits
>> which still exist in articles. I find it very unlikely that there are
>> 10 million contributors, even across all Wikimedia projects, that have
>> copyrightable contributions. (Of course, I'm ignoring anons - I don't
>> see how they can realistically sue for copyright infringement.) So I
>> think the expected number of problematic cases is significantly less
>> than 1, but it certainly isn't 0.
>
> We'll have. If you start with just 100.000 contributors and raise
> percentage to 10% (which may be reasonable too), you'll end with 100
> cases.

10% doesn't sound at all reasonable to me.

> But, it is reasonable to suppose that Mike's legal predictions are
> more relevant than mine :) So, legal part is no issue anymore for me.

Only the last percentage is really a legal prediction, the rest are
more predictions of human behaviour. That said, the last percentage is
probably the only one that anyone can give anything more than a wild
guess at (which is why I didn't choose any stronger words than
"plausible" to describe them).



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