[Licom-l] Deleted Content

Mon Apr 20 05:47:15 UTC 2009

A question was asked at Meta that I can't answer.

Does the relicensing proposal affect content that has been deleted?
More importantly, if currently deleted pages were to be restored at
some point after relicensing, which license(s) would apply to the
restored content?

Obviously the answer that makes life easy is to apply the relicensing
to everything, but a close reading of the license migration terms
makes me think that this may not be correct.

To quote GFDL 1.3: "The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC
contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time
before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing."

It feels like something of a stretch to claim that anything in our
deleted archives would be "republish"-ed until it is also undeleted,
which makes me wonder if the August 1st date implies a limit on when
content must be restored in order to count it as part of the
migration.

It is uncommon for deleted content to be restored months after the
fact, but if there is a license imposed limit here, it seems like
something to pay attention to.

-Robert Rohde