[Foundation-l] Offering Wikibooks content for sale

Tue Jul 4 13:59:31 UTC 2006

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

>Anthony wrote:
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>>snip
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>>This paragraph is somewhat contradictory, but it does explicitly say
>>that trademark law does not prevent giving Wikimedia credit for the
>>work by name.
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>>Anthony
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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>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.
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>What would the Wikimedia Foundation's reaction be if the material were 
>published without giving any credit to the Foundation or the original 
>authors?
>
>regards,
>lazyquasar
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That becomes an issue of copyright law.   At least according to U.S. 
copyright law, you need to list all of the authors who have a copyright 
claim over the content.  It is for this reason why I added the "authors" 
pages to the Wikijunior books, and this is now common practice for most 
Wikibooks that are at a substantial level of completion.  If you want to 
have your name included in the credits (which can be verified through 
page edits) of the Wikibook, you are asked to add your name to the list 
of authors.  Academic ethics alone would have you include these names, 
although the order of the names can be debated.

As far as using the name of the book (aka Wikijunior Big Cats) that is 
another story, and it is also a matter of how far does the WMF want to 
go with protecting their trademarks and how can ordinary users trying to 
act in good faith be able to make publications that also acknowlege that 
this content was created using WMF servers.  Certainly offering a credit 
on the "authors page" is not a violation of trademark law, and a minor 
issue is over if the WMF has any sort of copyright claim on content 
produced and edited on WMF servers.  On that point, I don't know.  It 
gets into fine points of copyright law where I know similar situations 
where copyright can be asserted by 3rd parties under some circumstances.  

For instance, Microsoft can assert copyright over all software that is 
generated by using their compilers, even if they didn't "author" that 
actual computer software.  In this case it doesn't change the GFDL, but 
the question does arise if there can be any sort of copyright claim by 
the WMF on content produced by Wikimedia projects.  The typical response 
on this mailing list is "No", but I wouldn't be so quick to jump to that 
conclusion unless it was in the form of an official statement by the WMF 
that they don't claim any copyright on any project materials.  In other 
words, even if there could be a copyright claim, the WMF is renoucing 
any potential copyright claims.  It is a two-edged sword in the sense 
that copyright claim also implies liability for content, although the 
WMF seems to be acting as though they are liable for Wikimedia project 
content as well.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning