[Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 10:15:30PM +0200, Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:
> 
> Anonymous contributions are problematic when licensing changes are
> needed. Wikipedia is big, but it will be a lot bigger in 10 years from
> now, with a lot more anonymous contributions.
> 
> The need for a license changes (in the future) is not zero:
> 1) Copyright law itself changes regularly, so we can't look far in the
> future and know what will be necessary then. 
> 2) We don't know if FDL and CC-AT-SA are going to reach compatibility, 
> 3) we don't know how a judge might rule if the "moral rights" in the
> European copyright-system conflict with public domain or copyleft
> licences.
> 4) The GNU licenses are english only, there is an internationalisation
> effort at CC. In many countries terms of use of a product need to be
> stated in the official languages of the country.
> 
> 
> Therefore wouldn't it be better to ask the transfer of copyright from
> anonymous contributors instead of an actual license under the GFDL? This
> is not a vote against the FDL at all, but it would retain the
> possibility of a license change in the future. Now, with each anonymous
> contribution, a license change becomes more and more something of an
> impossibility. 
>  
> Copyright could be transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation. A disclaimer
> could be issued that states that the contributions always will be used
> in a free and open copyleft spirit.
> 
> For contributors that have an account with a valid emailadres, nothing
> need to change. But if they loose interest, they should have the
> possibility to easy transfer their copyrights the Wikimedia Foundation.
> 
> What dou you think?

Legally can't work, copyright transfer can't be done by "clicking",
and that's especially so if copyright owner is anonymous.