[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of our 'MediaWiki' mark

Tue Nov 1 15:14:14 UTC 2005

Anthony DiPierro wrote

>3) The verbal agreement Jimmy and I made was that I would continue to
>  
>
>>retain copyright to software contributions I make during my employment.
>>    
>>
>
>
>Copyright assignment must be in writing. If you really care about this,
>well, you can figure out what to do. Of course it almost surely doesn't
>matter.
>  
>
Copyright assignment does not have to be in writing.  In this case, it 
would in many ways (particularly because Brian was contributing before 
employment by the Foundation) have to fall on the Foundation to prove 
that they own it.  A written agreement in this case, however, would have 
more legal merit.  E-mail logs like this where Brian claims copyright 
and is not disputed by anybody on the Foundation board like Jimbo could 
also be a claim on copyright in that regard because Brian's 
contributions are certainly not in doubt that he actually wrote some of 
the software in MediaWiki.

It is irrelevant anyway as this is a GPL'd piece of software and in the 
situation with copyleft software both the Foundation and Brian acting as 
an individual would be co-owners seeking to enforce provisions of the 
GPL if they choose to (like somebody selling a propritary version of 
MediaWiki and not disclosing source code and other details required by 
the GPL).  It would be for purposes of GPL enforcement that it might be 
desireable to grant copyright assignment to the Wikimedia Foundation 
anyway, just like the Free Software Foundation suggests that GNU 
software have the copyright assigned to them for GPL defense issues as 
well.  If you don't "own" the software or literary work, you can't 
defend the copyright.

That is where the Wikimedia Foundation may be in some trouble with 
Wikipedia content as there are several places where the Wikimedia 
Foundation disclaims any copyright to content on Wikipedia and other 
Wikimedia projects.  The Foundation really can't enforce a provision of 
the GFDL as a result if they don't have copyright ownership on any of 
the material.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning