Larry Sanger wrote:
Does Bomis hold official copyright on Wikipedia?
Yes, more or less. I'm not sure what that means. I'll leave it to Jimbo to articulate a position on that, which I believe he might already have done.
I'm afraid we don't have an official position on that. :-(
Plausible arguments have been made that the copyright rests with the original authors, and that Bomis/Wikipedia stands in the position of redistributor.
Big picture, the primary advantage to this for contributors might be that Bomis can't _also release_ the content under a proprietary license. The owner of content which has been placed under a free license can't ever "get it back", but can produce a derivative work which is then distributed under a proprietary license. This would be in addition to the existing free version.
I assume that would be undesirable for our contributors, who surely would be unhappy at such a development.
On the other hand, if the community decided someday that we wish the content were under a different license, a different *free* license, for some reason, then we'd have a hard time changing, even to another free license, because all of the past contributors haven't given us any right to do that.
The primary *disadvantage* to Bomis NOT owning copyright on the articles is standing in case of a lawsuit. I consider one of my jobs as trustee of the project is to sue the hell out of Microsoft or whoever if they try to do something unfree with the content. I'll have a harder time doing that if I'm not owner of the copyright, and lots of individual owners might be hard to organize into a coherent legal strategy.
Another major disadvantage (potentially) to our current "wide open" situation, is that third parties like Yahoo who want to legitimately use the content, under an open license, may be concerned that I can't point to anything or anyone as the definitive copyright owner, unless it is me.
All this stuff makes my head hurt, I must admit. I just want to make a free encyclopedia.