Larry Sanger wrote:
Does Bomis
hold official copyright on Wikipedia?
Yes, more or less. I'm not sure what that means. I'll leave it to
Jimbo to articulate a position on that, which I believe he might already
have done.
I'm afraid we don't have an official position on that. :-(
Plausible arguments have been made that the copyright rests with the
original authors, and that Bomis/Wikipedia stands in the position of
redistributor.
Big picture, the primary advantage to this for contributors might be
that Bomis can't _also release_ the content under a proprietary
license. The owner of content which has been placed under a free
license can't ever "get it back", but can produce a derivative work
which is then distributed under a proprietary license. This would be
in addition to the existing free version.
I assume that would be undesirable for our contributors, who surely
would be unhappy at such a development.
On the other hand, if the community decided someday that we wish the
content were under a different license, a different *free* license,
for some reason, then we'd have a hard time changing, even to another
free license, because all of the past contributors haven't given us
any right to do that.
The primary *disadvantage* to Bomis NOT owning copyright on the
articles is standing in case of a lawsuit. I consider one of my jobs
as trustee of the project is to sue the hell out of Microsoft or
whoever if they try to do something unfree with the content. I'll
have a harder time doing that if I'm not owner of the copyright, and
lots of individual owners might be hard to organize into a coherent
legal strategy.
Another major disadvantage (potentially) to our current "wide open"
situation, is that third parties like Yahoo who want to legitimately
use the content, under an open license, may be concerned that I can't
point to anything or anyone as the definitive copyright owner, unless
it is me.
All this stuff makes my head hurt, I must admit. I just want to make
a free encyclopedia.
--
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*"The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its*
* own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but *
* there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be *
* pursuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can *
* certainly be corrected by good men with rifles." -Jeff Cooper *
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