[Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

[Alex R.]

Would not it be more expedient to ask for a non-exclusive general license
to be transferred to Wikimedia Foundation, as Wikimedia's basic corporate
purpose
is to provide free content throughout the world (see
http://www.sunbiz.org/COR/2003/0620/90039369.tif )
a grant of copyright license should be well protected by the Florida State
AGs office,
possible court intervention and the cy-pres doctrine, such a non-exclusive
license would
be vast enough to allow the original author to do whatever else they want
with their
work while giving Wikimedia enough power to prevent infringement by third
parties and
to create any variations of open source licenses or copyleft licences in the
future.
Also conflict of law (private international law) issues would be forstalled
as their would be no
issue of agency (mandate) if the author grants the foundation to grant
further rights in the
future.

Quaere: preventing the original author from using their own work as they
wish does not fit with the
underlying policy considerations behind the open content movement. If
someone is writing
a book and wants to contribute part of their book to a Wikimedia Foundation
project that
should not prevent them from completing their work and exploiting it without
seeking
approval from Wikimedia (which might be withheld),  this would tend to scare
away contributors
who might otherwise have another outlet for their work and who might be
willing to contribute on
a non-exclusive basis.

The analogy with software is not the same as it is with other intellectual
property content that
might be author specific. The reason for having the copyright assigned in
the software context is
to prevent the software which essentially has many coauthors to have one
author to represent
it should anyone try and exploit it without respecting the rights of the
authors. This is not the
same kind of situation where there are contributors to a compilation work
(such as Wikipedia);
in the software situation it is doubtful that each coauthor would have any
possible use for their
contribution as the work functions as a whole, where as with a compliation
each author can
still find some potential use for their work outside of the compilation
(textbook, encyclopedia, etc).

Facts, science and other information cannot be copyrighted anyway, they
already exists outside the domain
of ownership (except when it intersects with patent, trademark or other
statutory protection
schemes).
Alex756

----- Original Message ----- 
"Imran Ghory" <imran at bits.bris.ac.uk> wrote on  Sunday, August 03, 2003 6:49
PM
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions


> IANAL. But I'm going to answer these questions from a legal viewpoint
> (without my personal opinion on the issue).
>
> On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> > The question before us then is this; can we state on our Wikibooks
copyright
> > policy page and on every edit page that by pressing save, that the
submitter
> > is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a non-exclusive right to license to use
their
> > own unique and copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other
> > copyleft license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a
defintion
> > of "copyleft" linked from that word)?
>
> Yes.
>
> > Can authors transfer the right re-license their work through a
click-through
> > agreement like we have with the "Save page" function, under the narrowly
> > defined terms mentioned, without assigning away all their rights to the
work?
>
> Yes.
>
> > Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from using purely FDL work
(such
> > as from Wikipedia)?
>
> Yes. The person who is importing the work will not be able to legally save
> the page and meet the required conditions.
>
> > Related question: If the above is true then could we add such a notice
to
> > Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions (we would also have to
> > contact every current and past contributor we could in order to ask them
> > about the change in copyright terms; if they say no or we can't find
them
> > their text will only be under the FDL)?
>
> Yes. If we were doing that we might as well ask for copyright assignments
> like the FSF do, so the wikipedia will be able to defend the copyright in
> court if it want to.
>
> Imran
> -- 
> http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran
>
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