Comment by 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.
> 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.
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.
Just link original author, and do notndestroy their work, even copyleft license wikipedia uses demands that!
Authors and revisions are available in the history tab. Editing an article is permitted by the license.
If editing an article opens you up to copyright lawsuits for "destroying their work", it's completely untenable.
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