[WikiEN-l] Our content gets *everywhere*

[David Gerard]

On 03/01/80, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> I have always maintained that Wikipedia editors should be implicitly
> appointing WMF as their non-exclusive agent whenever they edit.  This
> would give WMF standing to go after people who violate those copyrights
> when ever it deems it appropriate.  Most important is the viral nature
> of the material, and the way his carries through several generations of
> publication.  It is noteworthy in this regard, when liability is
> involved, that insurance companies will pay a claim while reserving the
> right to recover from the person who is responsible for the damages.


In practice it's not onerous because Wikipedia editors have so far
been pretty free and easy with reuse of their work. "Use our stuff!
Just release your changes too!"

Remember that free software and free content licenses are, in this
context, defences by people who are reusing the stuff, against a
theoretical insane or vindictive copyright owner.


> The public domain is part of the "res publica", and that kind of means
> that the "republic" should be protecting what belongs to the public. I'm
> not going to hold my breath waiting for them to understand that.


heh.


> We should be enforcing our claims in selected appropriate cases, but the
> way we use the GFDL has made this very difficult or nearly impossible
> without action being taken by individual editors.


It's a lot easier with images, which tend to (a) have a single named
creator (b) just get reused without much if any transformation. A case
like this, with a line of text written by an IP number a few years and
many edits ago ... As I said, asking Nokia nicely for an
acknowledgement note is about 100% more likely to get us something
beneficial to the project and to free content :-)


- d.