[Foundation-l] License dangers

Fri Jun 4 18:44:28 UTC 2004

Hi

I am new to your list and browsed the archives briefly. I have a concern 
related to the FDL. A little background first - I started a project ( 
http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst ) to do something similar to wikibooks but 
not quite as general. We think we'll just upload our books into 
wikibooks when we are done.

We decided that in FDL spirit we'd use content from wikipedia and 
wikibooks to kickstart some sections etc. One of our members raised the 
concern that wikipedia content isn't screened to ensure that the 
contributor holds the copyright and may therefore add it to wikipedia 
and transfer copyright license to the FDL.

I guess that wikipedia could just remove content that is queried by 
someone who claims to have the copyright. Is this what you plan to do 
if such a problem arises? I realise that it is clear what license you 
are using etc. but who takes the fall if some commits something they 
don't hold the copyright to?

Our real concern is that we want to actually print books and raising 
money is hard enough. We don't want to risk printing the books again if 
something came up. (The quick answer is to write everything ourselves 
but thats also the slowest answer and we'd like to act as decisively as 
possible too.)

Have all these sorts of issues been resolved for wikipedia?

Thanks,

Mark

-- 
--
Mark Horner 

Jabber/AIM/Yahoo:   marknewlyn 

Co-author:
http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst

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