David Gerard wrote:
On 03/01/80, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote
I have always maintained that Wikipedia editors
should be implicitly
appointing WMF as their non-exclusive agent whenever they edit. This
would give WMF standing to go after people who violate those copyrights
when ever it deems it appropriate. Most important is the viral nature
of the material, and the way his carries through several generations of
publication. It is noteworthy in this regard, when liability is
involved, that insurance companies will pay a claim while reserving the
right to recover from the person who is responsible for the damages.
In practice it's not onerous because Wikipedia editors have so far
been pretty free and easy with reuse of their work. "Use our stuff!
Just release your changes too!"
Sure. And this last point is the problematic one. It is not just a
matter of what the first user does. Through successive generations of
uncredited changes the material risks losing its viral nature. By
insisting on proper credits and the application of the licence to
modified works we can better expand the corpus of free material
throughout the various modifications which lead to a result quite
dissimilar from the originally licensed material.
Remember that free software and free content licenses
are, in this
context, defences by people who are reusing the stuff, against a
theoretical insane or vindictive copyright owner
These licences are still
conditional on a flow through of the licences.
I am more concerned with the people who wrongly claim copyrights on
material that is not copyrightable.
The public
domain is part of the "res publica", and that kind of means
that the "republic" should be protecting what belongs to the public. I'm
not going to hold my breath waiting for them to understand that.
heh.
Sorry if the subtleties of my thinking aren't recognizable. To me
"public domain" means that it belongs to everybody rather than nobody.
Whose responsibility is it to protect what belongs to everybody from
usurpation by some profit motivated individual or company?
We should be
enforcing our claims in selected appropriate cases, but the
way we use the GFDL has made this very difficult or nearly impossible
without action being taken by individual editors.
It's a lot easier with images, which tend to (a) have a single named
creator (b) just get reused without much if any transformation. A case
like this, with a line of text written by an IP number a few years and
many edits ago ... As I said, asking Nokia nicely for an
acknowledgement note is about 100% more likely to get us something
beneficial to the project and to free content :-)
Absolutely! Often a little quiet
shaming can be more effective than a
silly and ostentatious lawsuit.
Ec