[Foundation-l] Offering Wikibooks content for sale

Tue Jul 4 12:42:57 UTC 2006

On 7/4/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
>
> > snip
>
>
> >This paragraph is somewhat contradictory, but it does explicitly say
> >that trademark law does not prevent giving Wikimedia credit for the
> >work by name.
>
> If my understanding of the FDL is correct, then the publisher must at
> least provide a pointer back to the original authors and perhaps must
> list all of the authors in the published materials somewhere.
>
> What would the Wikimedia Foundation's reaction be if the material were
> published without giving any credit to the Foundation or the original
> authors?

Yes, this is all very unclear.  Hopefully Brad Patrick can start
tackling this in the near future, so that there can be an official
statement as to what copyright interest, if any, the Wikimedia
Foundation claims on content, and if they claim any, then how they
intend the GFDL to be applied to such content.  It would also be nice
to once and for all answer the question as to whether or not Wikimedia
claims to be the "publisher" as the term is used in the GFDL.

Of course this likely only solves a small sliver of the problem, as
every individual contributor *also* holds a copyright interest in the
content.  One can hope that a court would consider Big Cats (for
instance) to be a joint work, in which case permission only need to be
granted by a single contributor, but it's quite up in the air whether
or not that is true.

Anthony