Talk:Wikimedia Med/Letters

Copyright vs license

I think WhatamIdoing's point at en:WP:VPI#Guidelines for addressing external potential copyvios, while still being a distinction-without-an-effective-difference imho (but IANAL) is a good one. WP does not hold copyright to its content. It is a licensee of content under CC-BY-SA and happens to make it publicly available. It also obscures the original copyright holders via en:WP:OUTING, and the collaborative nature of the material makes it sometimes difficult to figure out who actually holds copyright. does that ip editor who removed a comma need to be tracked down and consulted? One could argue that effectively, WP at the very least acts as a sub-licensor. As such, it seems right that WP would be responsible at some level for enforcing the terms of the license under which it is made available, though again, i do not know what legal duty, if any, this might confer.

The upshot of this is that I think we should refer to the "license" rather than to "copyright" in these letter templates. -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 02:17, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

I see no particular responsibility of the coordinators of the Wikipedia project to do anything in response to copyright violation, which is still what I would call a transgression of the license. However, I think that policing or responding to violations could be a community role and it seems like one that people would enjoy doing and which would be useful to the Wikipedia project.

I agree that in many places in which the draft uses the term "copyright", "license" is the preferable term. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:48, 13 November 2012 (UTC)