FDL attribution by reference was Re: [Wikipedia-l] FDL used to stifle distribution of articles

Alex wrote:
>Who is the "they" that Ulrich Fuchs is talking about. 
>Certainly he can only take legal action against anyone 
>who uses his articles, but he is not authorized by 
>Wikipedians to sue for them, is he? 

Germany has some odd trademark laws in this regard and may also have similarly 
odd laws for copyright. A while ago a German firm sued the German makers of 
the open source vector illustration program KIllustrator for trademark 
infringement on behalf of Adobe (the makers of Adobe Illustrator). But Adobe 
had no idea that this was going on and in fact didn't want the bad publicity. 
IIRC nothing really happened except that KIllustrator was renamed to Kontour 
and the lives of the German KIllustrator coders were disrupted. 

So if a similar law applies for copyrights in Germany, then anybody can sue 
anybody else in Germany for copyright infringement on the unknowing behalf or 
consent of the copyright holder. 

If true, that seems rather dangerous to me. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)