IANAL. But I'm going to answer these questions from a legal viewpoint
(without my personal opinion on the issue).
On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
The question before us then is this; can we state on
our Wikibooks copyright
policy page and on every edit page that by pressing save, that the submitter
is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a non-exclusive right to license to use their
own unique and copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other
copyleft license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a defintion
of "copyleft" linked from that word)?
Yes.
Can authors transfer the right re-license their work
through a click-through
agreement like we have with the "Save page" function, under the narrowly
defined terms mentioned, without assigning away all their rights to the work?
Yes.
Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from
using purely FDL work (such
as from Wikipedia)?
Yes. The person who is importing the work will not be able to legally save
the page and meet the required conditions.
Related question: If the above is true then could we
add such a notice to
Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions (we would also have to
contact every current and past contributor we could in order to ask them
about the change in copyright terms; if they say no or we can't find them
their text will only be under the FDL)?
Yes. If we were doing that we might as well ask for copyright assignments
like the FSF do, so the wikipedia will be able to defend the copyright in
court if it want to.
Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran