Bill Ackman is rattling
the sabres of his legal team in a 77-page “legal demand.” Bizarrely,
he has doubled down on the claims that his wife’s verbatim copying of
Wikipedia content was appropriate. I previously debunked this in an
interview which was reported
in Slate. Neri
Oxman plagiarized from and violated Wikipedia’s copyright. (Oxman’s
infractions, like Claudine Gay’s, look to be the result of sloppy and
lazy scholarship rather than the wholesale theft of novel ideas.)
However, Ackman’s latest threat prompted me to wonder if the
Wikimedia Foundation, on its own behalf or that of its contributors, has
ever sued someone for violating its copyright?
Wikipedia is licensed under terms that requires attribution and that
the resulting work be licensed similarly. Wikipedia adopted this “copyleft” principle
from the software world. And in that domain we’ve seen The
Software Freedom Law Center successfully prompt companies to comply
with the GPL. In 2022, the Software
Freedom Conservancy’s (SFC) went even further; they sued Vizio for
failing to abide by GPL’s requirements on behalf of all
licensees/users of that software, not just its developers. The
case is to begin next month, in March 2024, but some of the early
pre-trial rulings were taken as positives for the SFC.
In the Wikipedia case, users retain their copyright, rather than
assigning or transferring it to the Wikimedia Foundation. Therefore,
those individual Wikipedians could sue Oxman. Might the success by the
SFC
against Vizio mean that the Wikimedia Foundation, or any user of
Wikipedia, could sue Oxman for infringement?
2024-03-01 update
In response to this question on Wikipedia’s
Village Pump, User:WhatamIdoing referred to the Wikipedia:Standard
license violation letter and Wikipedia:Standard
CC BY-SA violation letter. From the letters’ existence, I presume
there have been cases of users being notified they were infringing, but
the cases were of low visibility and little has gone before a court –
unlike some of the free software cases.
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