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Comment by some_random

9 hours ago

How is the right non-divestable if you can waive it? More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?

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some_random

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bawolff  5 hours ago

> More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?

Note, the cc-by-sa 4.0 license that wikipedia uses requires you to waive any moral rights to the extent possible. In canada if you are the creator of the work, then you can waive all of them, so its really a moot point. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.en

In general though, moral rights tend to be the sort of thing where they only come into play if you're being an asshole, so it mostly doesn't matter.

ghaff  8 hours ago

It seems to be a somewhat murky area of law. In Europe (and, I guess Canada) you can't really have public domain because of moral rights that you can't waive. IANAL but I've talked with IP lawyers about this and they've been sortof "Yes this is often kinda true." So the broad public domain that is generally true of the US government and which individuals can release in the US isn't really true in Europe as I understand it.

  • vidarh  6 hours ago

    Europe is nearly 50 different jurisdictions, spanning multiple very different legal traditions.

    But it is mostly not very murky. Moral rights and commercial rights are distinct in a wide range of jurisdictions. You can generally waive commercial rights, and that is for the most part sufficient for things to e.g. be "functionally" public domain in the ways most people care about.

    What moral rights prevent is generally speaking usually things like for someone else to take your work and simply put their name on it, or keeping your name on it but making changes that might do harm to the creator in various ways.

    There are nuances between jurisdictions, but it's generally not more difficult than being respectful of the effects (positive or negative) of attribution and integrity of a work.

    • ghaff  3 hours ago

      I don't really disagree. Open source is generally recognized among European states and, from a practical perspective, permissive licenses are mostly indistinguishable from public domain other than preserving notice of the original authorship in some form. A permissive license does allow you to make pretty much any changes you want and sell it or use it in another product (or not).

  • some_random  8 hours ago

    That's pretty crazy, seems like a ticking time bomb to me. I assume the precise meaning of "moral rights" varies by jurisdiction, but if from the integrity part of the Canadian definition started being broadly applied it would seriously change how things like moderation need to be done. I'm not a lawyer but I wouldn't be comfortable making any kind of modifications to text submitted by a Canadian contributor, even basic stuff like PII redaction. I find the Flight Stop example here pretty chilling https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/michael-snow/key-works/flig...

throw93949444  9 hours ago

The only legal way to waive copyright rights, is to hire an employee to produce the work. Individual contributors are not cogs in a machine, employees are!

And if someone produced work for 15 years, and edited 10000 articles... very hard to argue it is not permanent worker!

Wikipedia can easily work as "marketplace of ideas", linking original authors. That is not possible if you have editorial policy, political opinions and work like a corporation or a news paper.

  • bawolff  5 hours ago

    > The only legal way to waive copyright rights

    This is generally not true, but more importantly Wikipedia does not ask people to waive their copyright rights, only license it under a creative commons license. Its no different than how open source software works.

  • some_random  8 hours ago

    A "marketplace of ideas" wikipedia is not wikipedia, that's twitter or maybe reddit. More importantly, your theory of copyright being unwaivable without an employee-employer relationship makes the entire internet unworkable. Nothing could accept user input of any kind unless it can be ruled uncopyrightable.