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List:       wikipedia-l
Subject:    Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia-Specific License?
From:       Simon Kissane <sj_kissane () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2001-10-26 15:43:32
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--- Vicki Rosenzweig <vr@redbird.org> wrote:
[snip]
> I'm unsure of how valid this is, legally or
> ethically: but I Am Not A Lawyer.
Well, the basic legal issue is this -- we don't have
permission from a copyright holder to distribute
something, but make a best effort to locate them and
get such permission, yet never got an answer (be it
"yes you can" or "no you can't"). (We also have good
reason to presume that most of the people we can't
trace would say yes if we could.) Suppose then one of
the copyright holders we could not locate objected to
our distributing the materials without their
permission. We delete the offending materials, but are
we still legally liable for distributing them in the
first place? A relevant point here is that there is
probably little difference in commercial benefit to
the copyright holder between the FDL and an
alternative Wikipedia-Specific License.

But chances are that, even though we said we do, we
don't really use the FDL, I doubt we actually do,
legally speaking. Wikipedia doesn't presently fit many
of the FDL requirements, nor does it seem to me that
it could easily be meshed with them. Plus people are
trying to impose additionial requirments outside the
FDL, which as I've argued you can't do. So I think
that, even though what we say we use is the FDL, we
actually are using a different license, an unwritten
implied license created by Wikipedia. Similarly, the
(unwritten) legal agreement created between Wikipedia
and the contributors is to use this unwritten implied
license. (The agreement, like the license, is a
product of Wikipedia custom.)

And if we don't really use the FDL, but rather a
customary unwritten license, there is nothing stopping
us from writing down this customary license. 

[snip]
Simon

(P.S. I'm no lawyer either, but I'm applying to switch
to doing law next year.)

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