In the SpankingArt take-down, Wikia stated that they had an obligation under the licence to make the contents available and did so by making a backup available.


There was obviously some sulkiness in their response, but surely once someone has decided that they no longer wish to avail themselves of a GFDL content, surely there is no ongoing commitment to re-publish for others in perpetuity?

I guess this is a variation of the Deleted Article discussion, but it strikes me that once you have decided that you are no longer using the licensed item, you surely no longer have an obligation to maintain and distribute it. WMF have a problem within Wikipedia in that they still maintain the deleted articles hidden in the database so they are wrongly failing to redistribute them - however, if they destroyed the article, then it is not their problem that they deleted content that was licensed for use, not under a licence to be preserved.

OK, let's start asking for the deleted SlimVirgin articles (e.g. Lockerbie -- though WordBomb already has them) under the GFDL, and see how far we get.

In addition, let's get an answer as to why there hasn't been a full backup of Wikipedia been available since April 2007.

To gather in one place, I liked Euphonias' comment:




That is an important concept, because it is clear that most contributors do have a sense of "ownership" of what they contribute, and although they should be happy to have it constructively improved, most would not really be happy about contributing to a project that perverts the contributions. It is odd that the contributor seems to have less rights than the "pirates" - the only right you retain to your work is to be disassociated from it if it is abused.

There's no requirement for continuous publishing in the GFDL. I can kind of see how one might be confused into thinking there is, but such a requirement simply does not exist. This is throwing a bone to the people who want to continue looking at spanking art, nothing more.

I had a look at Wikipedia's discussion of their GFDL - and what a mess it is too. All that is clear is that nobody on Wikipedia can document what their rights and obligations are. I wonder if Jimbo even understands what he has (not) got.

Wikia believe that they have an obligation to republish, but apparently that is only a requirement (for one year) if they have produced "opaque" - hard - copies of the document in quantity. Wikia had no obligation whatsoever to continue publishing SpankingArt. SpankingArt should not have copied the Boy scout article without retitling it, and they didn't credit its source with a link back to Wikipedia. The copy now elsewhere is also in breach of GFDL as it does not credit its various sources. Looking at Verbatim Copying simply shows that Wikipedia have given up on trying to work out what their licence means. If Wikipedia cannot properly describe what its licensing conditions are, how, if it came to some sort of dispute, would they expect to be able to stand up in court and fight the case. As far as I can see, Wikipedia is no better off with GFDL than a big notice saying "Take what you want and don't bother us about it."