[Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

Thu Feb 12 06:57:14 UTC 2004

From: "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de>

<..snip..>

> User:Anthony DiPierro appears to be hell-bent to put the FDL to the test.
> He has created a complete fork of the English Wikipedia called "McFly":
> http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/

I have had some discussions with ADP regarding copyrights. He has his
own opinions regarding the interpretation of the GFDL.

> None of the individual articles make any mention of Wikipedia nor of the
> FDL. Only the main page does, but not exactly in desirable form either. It
> does not link to Wikipedia, instead it contains the text:

I think what he is trying to say is that Wikipedia is one encyclopedia,
and the GFDL does not require a history for each section of the publication
but for the whole publication.

> "by Andre Engels, Bryan Derksen, Brion Vibber, Michael Hardy,
> Vicki Rosenzweig, Anthony DiPierro, thousands of Wikipedians,
> and various others worldwide"

This is his attempt at fulfilling the fiver principal author rule of
attribution.
No doubt he looked for the individuals who made the most edits and
he determined them to be: Andre Engels, Bryan Derksen, Brion Vibber,
Michael Hardy, and Vicki Rosenzweig. Then he added himself and
also gave credit to Wikipedians as he believes that they hold the copyright,
not Wikipedia (just as JamesDay believes).

> And regarding the FDL:
>
> Copyright (c) 2004 Anthony DiPierro. [Standard FDL short version follows.]
> Warning: this license extends solely to those parts of this document which
> are copyright by Anthony DiPierro, who makes no claims as to the license
> status of other document parts. Use at your own risk!

This is his warranty disclaimer that he is adding.

> To summarize
> 1) Neither the McFly main page nor individual pages link back to Wikipedia
> or to its page histories

He does have a history section that links back:
http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/History

> 2) The main page does *not* state that the content which is not written by

> Anthony is licensed under the FDL.

Just as Wikipedia has rather unequivocally stated (until I changed it
recently)
"Please note that all contributions to McFly are considered to be released
under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you don't want your writing
to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it
here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a
public domain or similar free resource.
DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION! "

> We have to determine whether Wikipedia as a whole is "the document" or
> whether individual articles are.

What ADP is stating by his actions is that it does not matter what "we"
think.
He has interpreted the GFDL in his own manner, providing the names of
the five principal authors, links back to the original texts (history) that
all
contributions are considered released under the GFDL, and that he is
publishing
a documentation work that is encyclopedic. I see his strategy clearly.

> In my opinion, the English Wikipedia is
> no more a single document than the combined English and German Wikipedias
> are -- the English Wikipedia is an aggregation of separately FDL-licensed
> articles. This is clear because each document has a separate "history"
> section, a separate license footer, and most documents have different
> contributors.

> Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation. If he refuses
> to make the necessary changes I strongly recommend taking legal action as
> otherwise this could easily become a precedent for third parties to use
> Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should probably send a
> warning letter anyway because of the "this license extends solely .."
> part.

The question is who are the owners of these individual articles? Some argue
that the joint copyright is owned by all contributors to a particular
article,
and thus they have the "exclusive right" to issue a 512 takedown notice,
no one else has that authority. My interpretation is that Wikipedia is a
collective
copyright that is distinct from all individual contributions because the
whole
cannot exist without these parts and thus Wikipedia, as a voluntary
association
has an exclusive right and can issue the required notices. No one has tested
the law in this regard and it is not clear what the ISP will do if they
receive a
takedown notice. If they do nothing then Wikipedia will not only sue ADP but
the ISP as well.

 > The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without legal standing.
I
> therefore would like to ask Alex in particular to take a look at this case
> and help in preparing the necessary letter.

I will gladly help, but this may really be a test case and could require a
lot of
work and effort. I don't know if anyone would be able to do it for free.
Also
since Wikipedia has not published its work or registered it federally it
cannot
file suit against this individual (whom may be difficult to locate).

 > When I temp-banned Anthony for vandalism a few days ago I knew that he
was
> a troll. But this goes beyond simple trolling. Anthony's actions here
> could do serious long-term damage to our project, and we need to quickly
> respond.

Maybe this shows that using the GFDL is not necessarily the best licensing
scheme to use. But what are the actual damages, everyone wants the content
of Wikipedia copied, he is copying it, it is just that his interpretation of
what
the GFDL says is not the same as the interpretation of what is being done
on Wikipedia. Who is to say that Wikipedia is right and he is wrong? I have
argued for Terms of Use and Submission Standards, but everyone keeps
saying, "Oh Alex you want us to sound like lawyers, we don't like lawyers
we want to be an open community." ADP's actions are testing how open
Wikipedians are willing to be.

BTW, even if people start complaining about violation their attribution
rights on articles, he could just list five contributors for each article
and
then say he is complying no? It would take as many take down notices as
there are articles, he would get them, add the five authors who sent the
notice under sect. 512 and then he would say that he was complying and
refuse to take the material off his site (he is probably running the site
off his own dynamic DNS server so he is the ISP). Then for each page
the five prinicpal authors will have to sue him and he will say that he is
already complying and that at best the damages are nominal ($1) which
would mean that they would have to pay their attorney fees ($2,000 per
suit) and he would be in compliance. This would have to be repeated
for every Wikipedia article if you follow the JamesDay theory of
Wikipedian copyright (which I do not subscribe to, I think that
Wikipedia has copyright because of the collective nature of a wiki
project, we would have to sue him in the name of the association of
Wikipedians and argue that the page histories are part of the article
and that a transparent link has to go back to each article page, not just
the Wikipedia.org page mentioned on his "history section".

Will the Board of Trustees or the President of the Wikipedians
start registering Wikipedia at the  US Copyright Office soon?
Copyright registration is necessary to file suit or the Copyright
office has to be added as a party.

Alex756