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

Fri Aug 1 13:29:44 UTC 2008

On Friday 01 August 2008 06:01:08 David Goodman wrote:
> Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of
> our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word
> except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom
> with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take
> intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is
> material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and
> I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and
> republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim
> what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it.
> People do this with PD US government material routinely.)

No. You are not free to make free content nonfree. I do not want to see things 
I wrote claimed as copyrighted by someone else, claimed to be not free or, 
the worst, translated and enhanced and claimed nonfree (which has actually 
happened).

> we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it.  I'm not one, but I
> think  the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest
> possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they
> contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text
> rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what
> i expect, i hereby offer to do it.

And if by "the freest possible" you mean CC-BY, I hereby offer to revert you.