[WikiEN-l] Image licenses; a small suggestion

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/11/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
> By putting your picture into the wiki you are giving permission. The
> more interesting question is whether an underaged person has the legal
> right to enter into any kind of licensing agreement.

 You are arguably giving permission under the GFDL, although even that could
be disputed if you claim you didn't notice the contract/waiver when you made
the submission. On top of this, Wikipedia doesn't actually follow the GFDL.
They roughly follow the spirit of the GFDL, but there are quite a few
significant pieces that are missing. Since the GFDL is automatically revoked
whenever you break it, if you're going to rely on the argument that the
image is released under the GFDL then Wikimedia probably has no permission
to distribute any of the images at all.
 It'd be a much easier case from a legal standpoint to claim that by
contributing to an article you are contributing to a joint work, under a
joint authorship agreement which licenses the content to all third parties
under the terms of the GFDL and under Wikipedia's rough approximation of the
GFDL.
 The truth is, for now, no one really knows the true copyright status of
Wikipedia from a legal standpoint.

Ec

 Anthony