Re: can Wikipedia apply "CC-BY-SA-compatible FDL" retroactively?

At 04:56 PM 8/10/2008, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> > Are you saying that even if someone else published a work under
> > CC-BY, you couldn't publish a derivative work as a Knol article, even
> > if you attributed the base work to the author as required by CC-BY,
> > and published it under Knol's own CC-BY licensing option?
>
>That's my understanding, yes.
>
> > Would it be, not because you can't re-mix a CC-BY work into your own
> > CC-BY work (everyone says you can do this), but because you can't
> > grant *Google* the unlimited right to create "derivative works",
> > because that would include derivative works that don't include the
> > CC-BY attribution?
>
>I'm not entirely sure. Depending on jurisdiction, there may well be
>moral rights to attribution granted by law in addition to whatever
>rights are reserved when granting the license, so that might not even
>be an issue. I think it's simply a matter of you not being able to
>grant a license to someone else's work, regardless of what that
>license says. If it's a derivative work, then it might be ok, since
>you're the copyright holder of that work and it just contains, under
>license, someone else's work. What people have been doing, however, is
>just copying stuff straight from Wikipedia onto Knol and no modifying
>it at all, it that case it isn't a derivative work it's just copying
>the original work and you certainly can't grant Google a license to
>that.

I would assume that if user A grants everyone in the world a license 
to do X, Y, and Z, then you're allowed to submit your work to company 
Q which requires you to agree to terms that say "YOU give us 
permission to do X, Y, and Z".  Even though the permission is 
technically not yours to give.

Because, logically, if you did interpret it this way, what could 
possibly happen that anyone could sue for?  If you grant company Q 
the right to do X, Y, and Z and company Q actually does one of those 
things, user A can't claim they were wronged, because they granted 
the whole world the right to do X, Y and Z anyway.

         -Bennett

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