[WikiEN-l] Re: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com

Thu Jul 10 16:37:29 UTC 2003

Stevertigo wrote in part:

>Ironically, the notion that "your not supposed to make
>$$ off of  X" (as a claim) is kinda antithetical to
>the whole notion of lawsuits, which tend to be about
>"only Ims supposed to make money off X".

That's not the motivation of the FSF people, of course --
yet even so, they don't endorse that notion in the first place!
Commercial application is irrelevant to the GNU licences.
And Wikimedia seems to be in line with that too.

>And in the
>end, regardless of GNUFDL, a civil win would be
>represented (symbolically) in dough.

I'd expect any lawsuit initiated by the FSF, at least,
to have a cease-and-desist effect as its main goal.
Although Wikimedia is not a GNU project (as we know),
there are probably enough people here against profiting
that we'd also confine ourselves to that goal in our suits.
(Not that such a suit would be very practical in the first place
with such a large number of plaintiffs to manage.
Or could we initiate a class action?)

>Otherwise why would anyone bother forking out for a lair?

???

-- Toby