[WikiEN-l] Legal advice

Sat Jan 10 07:46:20 UTC 2004

Andrew Cleveland wrote:

> User:Anthony DiPierro claims on Wikipedia:Possible copyright 
> infringements that Wikipedia is violating his copyright by not 
> releasing the entirety of an article he modified under GFDL (Al Gore) 
> including images, some of which may have been used under fair use. The 
> images were included after his modifications. He claims the entire 
> article, including images, must be released under GFDL to avoid 
> breaking the license. I'm not a lawyer, I'm just confused (heh) and 
> worried that this may become a problem.. probably just me being weird.

This seems reasonable, and could be problematic.  If I release an 
article under the GFDL, and you republish it with additions, you have to 
let me (and everyone else) use the additions under the GFDL.  So it 
would be against the GFDL for a commercial company to take our articles, 
add proprietary images to them, and publish, not allowing us to copy 
their derived work because of the copyright images.  I think the 
Wikipedia case is probably similar, except it's us that's doing it.  
(But IANAL).

-Mark