[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Wed Jun 11 20:18:08 UTC 2008

Michael Bimmler wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 8:12 PM, Ting Chen <Wing.Philopp at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>   
>>> It is an issue of the individuals, because they are the ones whose
>>> rights have been breached.
>>>       
>> This is not that easy. If I contribute for the GNU projects and a company
>> comes and takes the part of code I contributed, builds it in its own
>> software and claim it to be its own property. It is my right that is
>> breached, yes. But the FSF would take the intrest of the project and sue the
>> company.
>>     
> IANAL, but how exactly can they sue them if they don't own the copyright
> (resp. patent rights or whatever) to the software?
> Are you suggesting that the WMF takes 'mandates' from individual WM
> contributors to sue on behalf of them? This would probably mean that a
> fund/endowment for 'the legal defense of the moral rights of Wikimedia
> contributors" would need to be created...
>   

"Agent" or "mandate" would come to roughly the same thing.  I'm not a 
big supporter of the idea of legal defence funds.  Ironically, I believe 
that defending our view could be done more cheaply without it.  Donors 
are likely to be more generous with a Foundation that has the guts to 
exercise its rights when it doesn't have the money in the bank for it.

The moral rights argument would likely be very weak in the United 
States.  While US copyright law does pay lip service to moral rights it 
does not penalize violations of moral rights.  We might do better with 
questions around who protects the rights of the public, or breach of 
contract -- perhaps even in a class action suit.  A lot of this is 
untrodden ground, so it's difficult to say where our most effective 
argument would lie. A little imagination would help.

Ec