[Wikilegal-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

Thu Feb 12 18:22:11 UTC 2004

(I am not a lawyer.)

I tend to find Delirium's interpretation most straightforward, probably in 
no small part because it is rather faithful to the letter of the license.

But then, I assume that in the U.S. context, there is a tendency that courts 
allow some (unspecified) degree of liberty to follow only spirit of the 
license and not the letter. And I think it is not easy to argue one practice 
(say Wikipedians) is okay in light of the spirit and the other (say, Mcfly 
users and Anthony) is not. One such sign is that we do not agree if linking 
back to the original article would satisfy the requirement to preserve 
history section. We do not agree if five authors should be listed, either.

But that aside, I wonder if there is a chance Anthony's practice is indeed 
rather literally faithful to the license. (I admit that I didn't experience 
what some of you guys did with him who is allegedly a disturbing troll, but 
I am hoping you can regard the following another devil's advocate).

Regarding the "warranty disclaimer" part:
It may be interpreted as saying that some articles and images are wholly or 
in part non-GFDL materials such as fully copyrighted materials under fair 
use, simple copyvio that is not detected yet, etc. The notice implies that 
he did not check those things, and the users should.

Regarding the absense of GFDL notice on each page:
The GFDL section 6 allows anyone to combine documents. If he is doing that, 
then it is okay that he replace the multiple license notices into just one. 
That's why there is only one notice for the whole site.

Regarding authors' names:
it seems that Wikipedia does not have copyright notice.

The two possible places that a copyright notice could be located are at the 
bottom of the page, and at Wikipedia:Copyright, but neither contains any 
information who the authors are. In that case, it is not very unreasonable 
not to preserve any copyright notice.

So I cannot really be sure if he is violating the license by not preserving 
any copyright notice from Wikipedia contents.

Regarding history:
Wikipedia's page history subunit is also said to be not necessarily History 
section as in the sense of GFDL. (See, for example, Wkipedia:verbatim 
copying).

Of course, I am not a lawyer, and I could be wrong.

Regards,

Tomos

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