[WikiEN-l] Copyright violation

Sun Nov 16 06:03:38 UTC 2003

Arvind Narayanan wrote:

>>Ironically, the bulk of [[Chest strategy and tactics]] was written by me 
>>and is therefore in the public domain.
>>    
>>
>I don't understand. Could you please explain how your contributions are PD?
>The edit pages say: "Please note that all contributions to Wikipedia are
>considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License".
>Do you mean to say that you've also put it up at some other site as PD?
>Even in that case, chessandbeyond copied it from wikipedia, and so they're
>still bound by the terms of the GFDL.
>  
>
They're only bound by the terms of the GFDL if the text was copyrighted 
in the first place.  If the author released it into the public domain 
before putting it on Wikipedia, Wikipedia cannot add additional 
restrictions to it.  He doesn't have to have published it somewhere 
else, just to make a statement, "I disclaim copyright interest in any of 
the works I have submitted to Wikipedia" or something similar.  If it's 
edited, the derived work can then be copyrighted and therefore GFDL'd -- 
but the mere fact that they got it from Wikipedia doesn't mean it's 
GFDL'd if it's a verbatim text in the public domain.  As a similar 
example, if someone came and copied some of our public domain poems 
(say, [[Invictus]]), the fact that they got them from Wikipedia would 
not oblige them to follow the GFDL, because we have no copyright on them.

-Mark