OMG wiki license

[Richard Franks]

I think this is all a bit overkill. I don't see any license other than
the description "this mailing list is for open discussion and
feedback", for this mailing list.. yet these potentially copyrightable
messages are mirrored by openmoko.com, gmane, etc.

Why isn't everyone being sued?

In our case, the source was either:
a) An intentional email sent without copyright notice, to a
membership-unknown public mailing list, with full knowledge that it
would be stored and made freely available.
b) An intentional edit made to a freely accessible public wiki.

I don't see a legal case being made out of this.

However, if a legal case could be made then linuxtogo are already
liable as they have already published copyrighted material?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Using_copyrighted_work_from_others

"Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not
the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an
encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your
own words, and submit it to Wikipedia. However, it would still be
unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a
reference."

Why don't we take a snapshot of the current wiki, and reword the
content into a new licensed wiki? It's less work than doing everything
all over again, we lose no contributions, and it's an opportunity to
reorganise a bit.

I'll volunteer to do a chunk of that work if we go that route.

Richard


On 1/27/07, David Schlesinger <David.Schlesinger at palmsource.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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...?
>
>
>