[Search-l] Wired Blog: Where Are The Announced Wikipedia Projects?

[Seth Finkelstein]

>> http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/04/update_where_ar.html
>> The catch might be buried in a fact that some users may be unaware of
>> unless they read the fine print: You won't have copyrights to any of
>> the content on Open Serving. Hmmm, another commercial DVD perhaps?
>
> Angela Beesley
> This isn't true at all. Authors always retain their copyright on all
> Wikia sites. They freely license that, usually under the GFDL,
> allowing others a non-exclusive right to use it under the terms of
> that license.

	People not steeped in the subtleties of copyright law often
write something like "not copyrighted" as a sloppy way of saying
"freely redistributable", since "copyrighted" is popularly taken as
a synonym for "all rights reserved" (which of course it isn't).

	But the gist of that article's statement seems reasonable.
That is, the business model of Open Serving is arguably that in return
for the free hosting service, it gets to be a *commercial* reseller of
all the material. While having a nominally non-exclusive license,
branding and bulk access issues could form a barrier which make it
exclusive in practice, as well as the potential threat of litigation
against anyone who looks like they might succeed in actually using the
non-exclusive aspect (that is, such litigation threats might be wrong,
wrong, wrong, but trying to win against better-financed lawyers is a
costly proposition at best, and quite an intimidating prospect).

	Note it's not clear if this is a *workable* business model,
which is a slightly different issue.

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  http://sethf.com/
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php