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Re: Wikipedia & Tor & ... moderators?

Anthony DiPierro wrote: 
On 12/25/05, Matthew Seth Flaschen <superm40@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

One important issue is copyright.  It
is necessary to ensure that you comply with the terms of the GFDL and
avoid copyright infringement.  The easiest way to do so is to clearly
inform users of the "Wikipedia-proxy" service that contributions are
released into the public domain.  This means you are free to post them
to Wikipedia (or anywhere else...).



It should be noted that many countries do not allow their citizens to
release copyrighted works into the public domain.  And, in fact, most
of these same countries don't allow their citizens to waive their
right to attribution.

So if you're going to do this, you're better off attributing the
content to the people who wrote it.

Anthony



As I said, I'm not going to do this. But for anyone that does: You're right that some countries don't technically allow PD release (US included). However, if someone saw a notice that they were doing so, it would be very difficult to sue the service later. Just in case, the notice could add that if public domain release is impossible, you "irrevocably grant all your rights to it, including the rights of reproduction, distribution, transmission, use, and modification." (based on the text Wikipedia uses for this purpose). However, the lawsuit would be especially difficult considering the plantiff would have to prove they were the anonymous user who wrote it, which is theoretically very difficult if they're using Tor. Similarly, they should be attributed simply as an anonymous Tor user, which is all the service operator knows anyway.

-Matt