[Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 52

[FT2]

I don't think so.  You license the material to be published subject to
certain conditions. You don't release it without any conditions on the
reuser, nor disclaim ownership of the text. You remain the copyright holder.
If the reuse conditions are breached, you are the owner of the rights that
were breached and have standing.

What you don't have is a case that the loss was of any economic impact to
you. You also might not have an argument that they used your text, if "your"
edits have been significantly reworked or only a minor part was in fact
used. You may have other remedies but that depends on local law - not all
countries recognize the same legal structures (equitable remedies,
injunctions/orders, etc). In many ways the Foundation may be the sole body
that could take *effective* action if it came to law.

This is a definite weak area of copyright law, which mainly seems to have
been designed with the primary purpose of covering identifiable works whose
reuse was clear, identifiable and economically impacted on the creator. A
wiki article, made of edits by 20 people, where any one person's
contribution is a sentence or so, and where no economic gain (just
attribution) was sought by the author, is not copyright law's main focus.

Deferring to lawyers on the list :)

FT2


On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 6:13 PM, <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:

>  > get from that content is obtained from my work they have translated
> > without my permission?
> > How do they put a dollar figure on the damages suffered if the income
> they
>
> I don't believe you could make the case that individual contributors have
> any standing to sue for copyright violations.  Similarly, when you
> contribute
> to the project, you are intrinsically giving up any rights you may think
> you possess in what you have written.  "Your permission" is a non-existent
> entity in the case of what you give to Wikipedia.
>