[WikiEN-l] GFDL lawsuits - who can sue?

Mon May 15 10:49:43 UTC 2006

On 5/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/15/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Rob Church wrote:
> > > On 12/05/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > >>> And if that's the case, can we sue?  Please?
> > >>>
> > >> Good luck with that.
> > >
> > > The Foundation can't, because it doesn't own the copyright to the
> > > material. It's up to the copyright holder to enforce their licencing.
> > >
> >
> > Could The Foundation sue /on behalf of/ those authors whose copyright
> > has been violated?
>
> INAL but my understanding is.
> Under US law they could if given permission to do so by the copyright
> holders (the situtation is compicated in the case of minors. The
> foundation would probably need their parents/gardians permissions).
>
At the very least it would certainly be possible for anyone who can
enter into a contract to assign their copyright to the foundation.

How many people you need permission from depends if you consider
Wikipedia to be a work of joint ownership or not (the other
alternative is that each work is independently created as a derivative
of the previous).  I tend to believe it would be considered a joint
work, as it makes the application of the GFDL a lot cleaner.
Actually, I think the cleanest interpretation would be that Wikipedia
is a collection of joint works, where in some cases those works
consist of single articles and in other cases they stretch out more
widely (due to copy/paste/etc).  But I don't really buy into the
interpretation that each version of each article is independently
created under permission of the GFDL, in part because the GFDL simply
isn't being followed.

Anyway, with a joint work all joint copyright owners (anyone who has
contributed copyrighted material) has "an equal right to register and
enforce the copyright".
[http://www.techtransfer.fsu.edu/jointownership.html]

> I don't know how chinese copyright law works and international
> copyright law tends to get very complex very fast.

Especially when the company in question is working directly with the
government in question.  Hence, "good luck with that".

Anthony