Re: [Sheflug] Sheflug - Wiki

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 11:49 +0100, Alan Dawson wrote:
> Wiki's are great for producing collaborative documents, but how can you track
> ownership and authorship of a document thats been edited on a wiki, perhaps by
> authenticated users, people working pseudonomously, or people working
> anonymously, behind NAT gateways where even tracking the IP address of changes
> is impossible?

Authenticated users are virtually the antithesis of a wiki user :)

You don't have to track ownership and authorship - if someone has put
stuff on a wiki, they are implicitly licensing it. It would a) be
difficult for them to claim ownership, b) impossible to impose
retrospective licensing changes (estoppel). 

> The concepts of ownership and copyright are radically altered on a public wiki,
> and given that its impossible to prove ownership of a public wiki document,
> there perhaps should be a default license on the wiki.

A 'default licence' makes absolutely no difference - the only person who
is able to grant a licence is the author. Having a EULA-style "this
licence applies if you click the button" or something is meaningless.

> The different Licenses and schemes effect which way information can flow.  If
> the Wiki is Public Domain, information from it could flow into a GPL pool, but
> not the other way.

By default in the UK, works are copyrighted, not public domain. If an
author is identifiable (and, my contributions to the wiki are), then the
work is not public domain. If they are not identified, then a court
would attempt to follow the intention of the author.

I'm not sure what you mean about public domain information "flow[ing]
into a GPL pool" - information that is public domain stays public
domain, period. (Think hard about this if you're going to argue ;)

If people require a copyright notice, I suggest people create pages
about themselves (for example, mine is AlexHudson), list the copyright
licence they wish their work to be governed by and the pages they have
edited. In six months we can then throw the wiki away when we realise
that everyone has licenced their work incompatibly and we cannot legally
distribute it ;)

(If there *absolutely must* be one, then I suggest CC-BY: but, please
don't)

Cheers,

Alex.

___________________________________________________________________

Sheffield Linux User's Group -
http://www.sheflug.co.uk/mailfaq.html

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.