[Foundation-l] GFDL publisher credit

Tue Jul 11 21:32:57 UTC 2006

Fred Bauder wrote:

>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.
>>    
>>
>
>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"?
>
At the root of things, "to publish" is "to make things public".  There 
is nothing in the concept to imply that the person doing so is in the 
business of producing books, magazines, web pages or anything of the 
sort.  At one time publication could have been by the medium of a town 
crier.

I don't think that the mere proofreader can be considered a publisher.  
He does not produce any new information that he makes public.

A key factor in distinguishing between a publisher and an ISP seems to 
be editorial control, and oonsciously active participation in the 
editing process.  An ISP who is told that there is something illegal 
about a page can easily remove it as a result of being so told.  Being 
pro-active in this may be more characteristic of a publisher, because it 
involves making our own legal decisions about whether a writing is in 
some fashion illegal.

Ec