[Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol

Fri Aug 1 01:18:24 UTC 2008

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:39 PM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Massimiliano writes:
>
>>> How could you add SA, for example, without being the original
>>> licensor, for importing to Wikipedia? How could you subtract it
>>> without being the original licensor(s), for importing to Knol?
>>
>> As long as you put the author's credits, respecting in this way the
>> request of attribution, you can change the license for your derivative
>> works and this includes also adding a SA clause. At least this is what
>> I have ever believed.
>
> Sure, a sufficiently transformative derivative work might give you the
> ability to create a new license with strong copyleft. But that's not
> what we've been seeing on Knol or what we've been discussing here, it
> seems to me. Instead, we've been talking about importing and exporting
> whole articles.
>
Still, what legal problems could possibly be created by copying a
CC-BY article from Knol to Wikipedia and then not making any changes,
as long as you maintain the attribution?  Presumably, the whole point
of importing it would be to improve it, and the "sufficiently
transformative" bar is incredibly low, but even if you don't create a
derivative, what's the problem?