On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Alex R. wrote:
And what about copyright infringements, privacy right
violations and
defamation that his hidden in the page history. If this is all released
under the GFDL and Wikipedia has no warranty disclaimers (which
are allowed under the GFDL) then doesn't Wikipedia have liability
for allowing such wrongful texts to be distributed further?
Where such things exist (that is, where the FDL license was never valid
because the copyright owner didn't agree and fair use is not clear, or
where the material violated the [explicit? implicit?] terms of use of
the site and were thus unacceptable to Wikipedia in the first place),
the revisions in question should be withdrawn from distribution -- that
is, removed from the 'old' table so they are no longer distributed by
Wikipedia on the web and in public database dumps.
Please provide a list of any such revisions you are aware of so this can
be done.
The suggestion that older revisions are no longer under the FDL is
completely incomprehensible to me. They are a part of Wikipedia. They were
provided to Wikipedia under the FDL and no other terms. We therefore
cannot distribute them under any other terms, but are free to distribute
them under the FDL. What else could they be?
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't make any sense to me. Are
bookstores forbidden from selling the first edition of a book after the
second edition is released? Is Linux 2.2 contraband because Linux 2.4 is
available and now I have to contract separately with every contributor to
Linux 2.2 if I want to use the slimmer older version for an embedded
device with limited memory? There's no expiration date on the license.
(Besides the expiration date of the copyright, of course!)
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)