QUOTE(Emperor @ Fri 22nd October 2010, 1:44pm)
QUOTE(Text @ Thu 21st October 2010, 7:35pm)
QUOTE
If nothing else, Mr. Godwin will be remembered as the genius who somehow finagled the switch from GFDL to CC-by-SA.
Fair Use kills any kind of free license. If i am in USA, i can take just about anything and pretend to use it under the concept of Fair Use and Fair Dealing, why bother with licenses? Almost no one would abide by them and in any case it's all reduced to a person name, if not a website name ("this photo comes from site X" and that's about it for license compliance), thanks to the latest CC versions.
What are you saying? That the vast majority of Wikipedians do not understand the legal conditions in which they contribute content?
Probably very little of the articles are copyrightable on wikipedia. If it is plain facts they can't be copyrighted anyway. Most of the prose is plagiarized from elsewhere so they won't get copyright on that, then it gets micro tweaked with numerous de minimus word changes, sentence reorganisations, and punctuation changes, and you rarely get to claim copyright on a spelling fix, or comma insertion.
The copyrightable stuff on wikipedia mainly exists in the talk pages, the trolls, and the vandalisms.