[WikiEN-l] Licensing concern.

Mon Jun 20 03:40:18 UTC 2005

en:User:UninvitedCompany has a user page which contains text with a
form much like a standard copyright grant, which makes the claim that
because wikipedia or it's articles are a collective work by many
authors that any contributor, no matter how minor (as his less than 3k
edits are quite minor compared to the size of wikipedia as a whole
which he lays claim to), is entitled to relicense the work as a whole
under any license they see fit. He then goes on to use this to grant
the entire wikipedia under CC-BY-SA because he has issues with the
GFDL.   Although he has been careful to pad his words with the
expected IANALs, it is pretty clear his intention is to circumvent the
licensing of Wikipedia and, failing that, to encourage others to
disregard our licensing.

When the issue of User:Pioneer12's non-article edits came up ... I
didn't care too much because the issue was the licensing of his work,
not mine.  In this case UninvitedCompany is making an effort to
circumvent the licensing on my work that I have chosen, by attempting
to relicense that work against my wishes. I consider this to be
profoundly anti-social.

Although uninvitedcompany has been more than polite in my discussion
with him on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:UninvitedCompany
(more polite than I for sure), he refuses to stop attempting to
relicense my work via the text on his user page.

I understand that UninvitedCompany dislikes the GFDL and that he is
not alone in that position. I, however disagree with his position on
the GFDL and his idea of what other people think of the GFDL. For
example, the position of debian legal is not as strongly negative as
he implies, because the license is setup to only have teeth against
distribution so the 'encrypted storage' issue is generally a strawman
argument.  I specifically prefer the GFDL over the CC-BY-SA because
the DRM restriction would make life hard for someone distributing my
content using a device which involuntarily locks the content with DRM
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/01/10/everything_you_ever_wanted/).
The GFDL's strong DRM terms contain an intentional side effect that
may help slow the market penetration of devices which subjugate the
users of the technology, and I strongly support this protection
because it is certan that since I use Free Software I would be unable
to access content given to me by users of CPRM devices no matter their
good intentions, and because only through creating 'licensed
publishers' can the mass-media companies completely close the hole
that allows the illegal distribution of their work. Such a future
would likely deny me the effective ability to publish altogether, as
long as you define effective to mean not providing a special playing
device with my work and publish as covering a wider audience than some
free software geeks.

... but the arguments for and against the GFDL really don't matter
here: My work is licensed under the GFDL and only the GFDL. It is
almost certainly not possible for User:UninvitedCompany or anyone else
to change that, but it is terribly impolite for him to use space on
Wikipedia (userpager or otherwise) to make such claims that disagree
with our license text and the wishes of (at least) some of the
editors.   The argument UninvitedCompany is advocating would allow any
editor to distribute wikipedia under any license he wishes no matter
how more or less restrictive.  Judging by the small number of people
who dual license their work as PD or BSD, I suspect many would
disagree.

So I'd like to ask the community at large to please ask uninvited
company to revise his user page.  I don't think his claim has any more
merit than pioneer12's disagreement with the form he submitted all his
talk text through, but I think it's all the more negative because it
purports to effect the licensing of work by authors other than him
rather than just his own.