On 10/21/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> What do you think the WMF should do if it *did*
have a clear legal
> case? What if someone called their proprietary encyclopedia
> "Wikipedia Premium Edition"?
[snip]
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think that
under the GFDL,
anybody is free to take our content, repackage it and sell it for a
zillion dollars without giving us shit as long as they also license it
under the GFDL allowing another someone to sell it for a zillion
dollars and not give them shit. Isn't that one of the reasons we don't
allow "non commercial use only" and "Wikipedia only" licenses on
images?
Indeed but the there are two key points you might be missing:
1) They can take the content but only if they keep it under the GNU
Free Documentation License, as you noted, which pretty much precludes
the 'proprietary' mentioned in the ancestor post.
2) there is that they can take the *content*, not the *name*. The
content is free the name is not.
And why should or would the name be free? While trademarks are often
regarded as assets of the trademark holder there is another completely
valid way of looking at them: Trademarks are a form of consumer
protection, a type of anti-fraud device. They exist to protect the
public from being mislead by someone trying to pass off something else
as Wikipedia that clearly isn't.
I could see a good argument that the name should belong to 'the
community' or 'the authors' rather than the WikiMedia foundation....
But presenting ownership of a trademark directly to a nearly
indefinable, amorphous, self-selecting, and often internally
conflicted, blob of people randomly scattered about the globe is
probably impossible legally and probably undesirable.
So, we have the WikiMedia Foundation a charitable non-profit with a
substantially editor-elected board of trustees which fills that role
of handling various things that the distributed users do not or can
not do. The 'community' of authors and the WMF have a healthy and
mutually beneficial relationship.
The WMF's absolute authority over the daily operation of the site and
all legal matters is balanced by the fact that all of the content
comes from the community of editors, most of the funding comes from
the public, and that the foundation isn't even a copyright holder over
the content ... they use it at the mercy of free licenses just like
anyone else. (Since the WMF does not have even the slightest
privileged position over the content licensing, the community could
manage a successful fork if something terrible happened).