[Foundation-l] Re: what is partnership ?

[Michael Snow]

Neil Harris wrote:

> The content belongs to its original copyright owners, and increasingly,
> the Wikimedia Foundation is their official copyright agent.

Please avoid statements like this, as they are potentially misleading. 
While it is theoretically possible that at some point in the future, the 
Foundation might take legal action against people who misuse content 
taken from Wikimedia in violation of the licensing terms, contributors 
do not assign their copyrights to the Foundation, and the Foundation 
does not assume a duty to protect these rights. The sense in which the 
Foundation is an official agent for copyright issues (actually the agent 
is Jimbo personally) is with respect to third parties who have 
complaints about their copyrighted material being infringed by use on 
Wikimedia projects.

There is some language in [[en:Wikipedia:Submission Standards]] about 
appointing the Foundation as an agent for downstream copyright 
compliance issues. That page is a draft, most of it now more than a year 
old, and has never been adopted as official policy. As things currently 
stand, contributors have every right to enforce their own copyrights 
against outside parties as they see fit, and don't need for the 
Foundation to get involved.

--Michael Snow