[Foundation-l] GFDL publisher credit

Wed Jul 12 13:53:39 UTC 2006

Anthony wrote:

>>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.
>
I would dare say that the amount of content that has been contributed by 
Danny as a result of his official duties is so trivially small that it 
can be ignored completely, especially on the major projects like 
Wikipedia.  I'm not saying that such contributions are meaningless, but 
it won't really have any impact on any copyright issues for Wikimedia 
project content.

As far as the WMF disclaiming copyright interest, I guess as an 
"official" policy statement that has been issued by the WMF, you are 
correct.  However, there have been plenty of statements on this list and 
elsewhere disclaiming such interest that I think it would be very 
difficult now to assert copyright interest as well.  When I added the 
WMF author credit (compilation credit?) to the Wikijunior books, I was 
trying to give the WMF the benefit of the doubt and at least help 
preserve any copyright interest in content like that.  Indeed the only 
reason and justification for pulling the Wikijunior Big Cats book was 
specifically because the WMF was mentioned as the author when such 
attribution was being denied.

The GFDL is one of the reasons why the messy business of copyright 
assignment has not been dealt with before.  It is interesting that on 
none of the Wikimedia projects is there a copyright statement anywhere, 
and only on the [[Wikibooks:Copyright]] page can you even find the 
copyright symbol and any assertion of copyright, even on behalf of the 
contributors.  Wikipedia lacks even this simply copyright claim, as do 
other Wikimedia projects.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning