On 4/14/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On 4/14/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
It's unclear whether or not it's true that you can't retract the GFDL. I've read before that if the GFDL is considered a waiver then it can be retracted at any time.
Also note that the rights under the GFDL are automatically terminated whenever you "copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except as expressly provided for under this License". And considering the fact that pretty much no one uses GFDL-contributed texts "as expressly provided for under" the GFDL, that means pretty much everyone has already had their rights under the GFDL terminated. This part will probably be fixed in the next version of the GFDL.
Finally, it seems to me it'd be near impossible for anyone but the WMF to show in court that the copyright holder ever licensed the work under the GFDL in the first place.
So if a copyright holder ever really wanted to take back the GFDL-licensed text, it seems it'd be incredibly easy for them to do so.
Unless the license is withdrawn almost immediately, it would likely be impossible to enforce the withdrawal. When the mirror sites pick it up their actions are based on the licence status when they take the material. If this happens in the time between the granting and the withdrawal they have a legal copy.
I'm not sure what it means to "have a legal copy", but unless that mirror site has a license to copy and distribute the work it doesn't matter when they downloaded that copy.
Does the mirror site have a license, because someone checked a box on a completely different site saying that they release the work under the GFDL? Maybe, but it seems this would be something difficult to convince a judge happened in the first place. Once the copyright holder has convinced the judge that she has a valid copyright on the work it's up to the mirror site to show they have a license.
The contributor wanting to withdraw would likely need to notify each of these sites individually.
In most cases if they want any significant damages they'd have to notify the site, and the site would have to ignore their request, yeah.
Anthony