[Foundation-l] Only non-commercial re-use od Wiki content?

Fri May 6 09:40:35 UTC 2005

On 5/6/05, Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron at gmail.com> wrote:

> Once again, many legislations forbid that authors put their work in PD.
> 
> Why ? Because publishers would be very happy to force them to do so !
> It's a protection for authors.

Certainly not. A publisher would not want an author to put their work
in the PD, because it means that any other publisher can republish the
work without charge. A publisher would prefer to make publication by
others either illegal (by taking over the copyright) or otherwise as
restricted as possible. Public Domain would be the full antithesis of
that.

> So, chosing PD as a basis is a major legal flaw that will give wikinews
> team a lot of headaches... and that will make me very busy on irc :)

In my opinion, PD in that case should simply be taken to mean "the
author grants everyone unlimited rights to do as they please."

Which, by the way, is indeed impossible in the law of certain
countries. I as a Dutchman for example cannot sign away my right to
object to the material being published under another name than mine,
or to mutilation of the work in such a way that it is damaging to my
honour or good name as the author.

Andre Engels