[Foundation-l] GFDL publisher credit

Wed Jul 12 12:35:03 UTC 2006

Ray Saintonge wrote:

>If Wikimedia wants to hold a copyright interest inthis material it needs 
>to be ready to defend those copyrights in a serious way.  Having an 
>employee make ad-hoc, arbitrary and speculative pronouncements on the 
>law without a clear policy from the Board to back it up probably puts 
>the entire project into greater peril than the obvious silliness of the 
>more ignorant copyright violators.
>
>Ec
>
The precedence that I would like to use for why the WMF should hold 
copyright on Wikimedia project content is the same reason why the Free 
Software Foundation holds copyright for the GNU projects:  If there is a 
copyright violation, they can be a legal party to enforcing the 
copyright and defending the GPL.

The same thing (I would hope) could apply to the WMF if there is a GFDL 
violation.  As it stands right now, by disclaiming copyright, all the 
WMF can do to enforce a flagarant copyright violation of Wikipedia 
content is sit on the sidelines and act as a cheerleader.  Brad would be 
legally excluded from even being able to offer advise.  If you are an 
individual contributor and want to defend the copyright of content that 
you wrote, you would have to hire your own counsel, as would each 
seperate contributor who would want to join in the legal defense.

Frankly, I think this is an ugly situation, although it is "safe" for 
the WMF and from a legal liability perspective, I do understand why the 
decision to not claim copyright was done.  The liability instead rests 
on the individual contributors.  Each time you add some content to 
Wikimedia projects, particularly if you use the same account for each 
contribution and are prominent in the "community", you put yourself into 
harm's way legally speaking.  You can be held responsible for the 
content that you added, or even failed to edit out when you made a minor 
change to a page.  In other words, this approach to playing it safe 
really is just transfering liability from the WMF to individual users.

That really should be motivation to being a major contributor to 
Wikimedia projects, isn't it?

-- 
Robert Scott Horning