[Foundation-l] GFDL publisher credit (was: Wikibooks for sale)

Tue Jul 4 17:31:11 UTC 2006

On Jul 4, 2006, at 10:44 AM, Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

> Under US Law, Wikimedia is the "publisher" because they create
> "collections" of works of the
> Wikipedia site and "publish" them to the world as XML dumps. Whether
> electronic or in book form, they
> are publishing. This being said, given the nebulous and undefined  
> state
> of internet IP law,
> whether they are a publisher or not, there's no legal precedence to
> determine liability, so at present
> they are operating in an area of experimental law on the frontiers of
> human knowledge.
>
> Jeff

Not exactly and now that you are a "publisher" too, let us discuss  
the problem. Someone comes on your wiki and enters the information,  
"John Doe murdered his wife, Jane". You don't notice it and after 6  
months or so John Doe files a libel action. You might want to claim  
that the anonymous ip who entered that information was the publisher,  
not you. There is a variant where that edit was contained in an XML  
dump that you did not notice. Meanwhile Wikipedia has deleted it  
completely, even from the history of the article. This is all pretty  
theoretical until there is significant distribution of a serious  
libel, but I throw it out to think about. Now suppose you did notice  
the information and rather than deleting it you just corrected the  
grammar and spelling. Are you the publisher  now? And who is "you"?

Fred