On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Changing the license of every article would take a long time, but it could be done. Changing a fraction of the articles would be even easier.
The fraction that have only been edited by logged in and currently active users, yes.
Those would be the absolute easiest. Others could be done with a little more effort (especially with some code). And some would be fairly difficult.
And that's even if you accept your assertion that "Changing license would require the permission of every contributor that hasn't had all their contributions removed".
Do you question the assertion?
Yes, I do question it, but I'm not really sure, so I'm willing to assume for the sake of the argument that this assertion is correct.
The only way you could get away with not having someone's permission would be fair use, but that causes problems with reusing parts of articles. While one sentence may be fair use when used in the entire article, it might not be fair use when used as part of just that paragraph.
I wasn't thinking of fair use. I was thinking "work of joint authorship".