Author: davidco

Description:
I know many wiki's seem to be struggling with licenses and copyright and I came up with what I
think is an elegant solution.

On the first edit of an Article, have another text box for "License or Copyright Notice" and a
checkbox for [ ] Public Domain [ ] Copyright. The default would be PD. If the user enters text
into the textbox, the Copyright checkbox is set. On submit, the copyright text gets saved in the
database with the username of the author. This would only be available for logged-in users. All
other Articles would get set as Public Domain.

So then at the top of that page, the license is mentioned at the top of the page saying something
like "This Article is copyrighted. See {link} for details."

Only the original author would be allowed to change the copyright, but the contents would be
editable. In the case of a byline author, all future edits are considered gifts to the byline
author. In the case of a collective license, like one of the Creative Commons licenses, each person
that edits the article is responsible for signing it and agreeing to the license. (If they don't
then they're giving away their rights).

So a MediaWiki wiki could then allow PD and licensed content in a shared environment without any
legal hassles.

Even if someone could write up a list of things that would need to be changed, I could probably
jump into the code myself. Maybe this could be an extenstion or something.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement