OMG wiki license

[David Schlesinger]

On 1/27/07 3:26 AM, "Jon Phillips" <jon at rejon.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 16:21 +0100, Harald Welte wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 07:29:47AM -0500, Richard Franks wrote:
>>> then there is no copyright issue as the contributors have implicitly
>>> put their words into the public domain?
> 
> This is not true and for sure in the US, where the instant someone
> contributes, their contribution is governed under copyright.

Correct. You can't "implicitly" put anything into the public domain under US
copyright law: you'd have to make a specific and concrete declaration to do
so, or (more usually) simply wait for the copyright on it to expire...

If you're interesting in folding all the Wiki content under the FDL, and you
want to avoid running afoul of potential copyright entanglements, you're
going to have to start over from scratch, I believe.

You're also going to need to have each participant explicitly agree
(probably when their account is created) to get explicit agreement that they
abandon any interests they hold in any content they create on the site and
assign copyright to such content to "The OpenMoko Project" or whatever. You
might well also want a statement to the effect that any content they submit
must not be derivative of material held under copyright elsewhere and be
free of other encumbrances, etc., etc...

This could get complicated, see...?


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