[Foundation-l] re GFDL publisher credit

Sat Jul 15 16:57:03 UTC 2006

Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Robert Scott Horning wrote:
>
>>At the moment, however, I don't know of any specific content for any 
>>Wikimedia project that has had formal copyright registration occur.  And 
>>you are correct that trying to prove damages that a free project like 
>>this would be difficult at best for any monitary amount, although I 
>>think a judge could still come up with at least some modest amount just 
>>to prove a point that copyright violations are wrong to do, even for 
>>free content.
>>
>>    
>>
>I don't know that a judge would do that.  Imposing punitive damages 
>without legal authority is something that could be easily reversed on 
>appeal.  The statutory damages provisions in effect are what provides 
>the authority.  The judge then has flexibility within the numerical 
>boundaries in the law.
>  
>
What I was trying to imply here is that a case for some damages might 
still be made, even though by being made available for "free" would 
certainly made such award astonishingly small compared to what you would 
have gained from trying to publish content with a more conventional "all 
rights reserved" copyright.  The formula for determining that award 
would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis and would be something 
close to a nightmare for a judge to determine, or a plaintiff to present 
as reasonable for copyleft content.  Copyleft content does have some 
restrictions, and a violation of copyleft principles can potentially 
show some damage depending on how blatant of a copyright violation was 
done that completely ignored the license but treated it as public domain 
content instead.

Having statutory damages available would act as a much better deterant 
from people who wouldn't care about any copyright infringement or 
violations of the terms of a license like the GFDL.  I think on this 
point we are agreed.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning