[Foundation-l] GFDL publisher credit

Wed Jul 12 13:04:03 UTC 2006

On 7/12/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> 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.

AFAIK, Wikimedia has *not* (yet?) disclaimed any copyright interest
they may hold in this content.  They don't claim copyright on the
contributions made by individuals, and they haven't gotten into the
messy business of copyright assignment, but there is a quite
legitimate argument that they hold copyright on anything added by
employees in the scope of their employment (such as Jimbo and/or
Danny), and possibly that they hold some sort of compilation
copyright.  I think it's quite likely that if Wikimedia doesn't
explicitly disclaim copyright on these works that they do hold at
least some copyright interest in them.