[Foundation-l] Re: what is partnership ?

[Anthere]

Michael Snow a écrit:
> 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

I might however, add to this, that at least according to french law, the 
foundation hold another responsability by being the owner of the servers 
hosting the data. As such, copyright violation is not the only issue, 
but presence of illicite content also is. In case of problematic 
content, the author of the content is liable of the words written and 
ideas conveyed, and the foundation is liable of letting the content stay 
from the moment it was told it is there and problematic.

Ant