[WikiEN-l] Imagine the lawsuit... just imagine it...

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium to launch this week
> Larry Sanger: "The conclusion you are trying to establish is that  
> we cannot
> relicense our versions of Wikipedia articles with GFDL and CC.  Why  
> not?
> Does the GFDL explicitly forbid licensing works under another  
> license in
> addition?"
>
> Is he seriously suggesting that they can basically just license our  
> works
> under whatever license they please as long as they also license it  
> under the
> GFDL?
>
> I can't believe they've gone 'live' without even sorting out basic  
> copyright
> issues... CZ is a joke.

IANAL... IANAIPL.. but I read Slashdot a lot (isn't that just as  
good?) and I don't remember any headlines saying "Supreme court  
decides in favor of GPL!" Even the GPL is a bit up in the air.

Now, the GFDL... I don't think there's any really big, important  
project _except_ Wikipedia, and I don't think Wikipedia has ever  
engaged in any lawsuits in which the GFDL played any kind of role  
whatsoever. The GFDL is so legally puzzling that Wikipedia itself  
can't give nice, simple, crystal-clear rules on how to re-use  
Wikipedia content. Nobody understand what the attribution and history  
rules really mean and what does or does not satisfy them in practice.  
And none of what anyone thinks they might understand has ever been  
tested in court.

Suppose Citizendium does go ahead and reuse big chunks of Wikipedia  
under some complicated legal mishmash of a license, and let's suppose  
the essence of the situation is that a) in a broad sort of way,  
Citizendium allows free-as-in-freedom re-use; b) Wikipedia, the Free  
Software Foundation, and the EFF all agree that whatever Citizendium  
is doing can be characterized as a "free license."

Who the heck is going to sue Citizendium? Nobody has a big stake in  
their Wikipedia contributions. There's no money involved. And so many  
of the issues involve other licenses being _less_ free than GFDL.

Who is going to pay the big lawyers' fees? And pay for a photographer  
to take the twenty-five eight-by-ten color photographs with arrows  
and a paragraph on the back to bring to court, showing which  
paragraphs were in which versions of what when under which license?

And there probably isn't even anything resembling a case _until a  
third party re-uses Citizendium content_.

"Your honor, this print publisher will testify that they WOULD have  
published a print book based on Citizendium content, and it WOULD  
have included MY paragraphs, if Citizendium hadn't used a  
noncommercial license. And if they had, they would have paid me  
exactly nothing at all. And I've been terribly hurt by the fact that  
they don't have the _potential_ to reuse my work without paying me.  
Or maybe they do, but they aren't sure they do, because the  
Citizendium license is so tangled and murky and self-contradictory.  
So I've been deprived of the precious opportunity to see my name in  
print and to get paid nothing for it. Unless they use the Wikipedia  
version, of course, which they don't want to do because, they just  
don't."

And the other side says "Your honor, please ask the plaintiff, Horace  
Wadsworth Pennypacker II, SSN 078-05-1120, to _prove_ that he is  
indeed user 'Pfiffltriggi.'"

The only way this can ever be a problem is if Jimbo decides to have  
Wikipedia sue Citizendium based on ego and personal spite, and I  
don't think he's that spiteful, and I'm not sure he could convince  
the Wikimedia Foundation to do it.

And by golly if I ever see a banner saying "Wikimedia needs your  
contribution to fund its continuing legal struggle against  
Citizendium" you can't expect much in the way of contributions from  
_me._