[throw93949444]

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]

> 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]

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.

[throw93949444]

Just link original author, and do notndestroy their work, even copyleft license wikipedia uses demands that!

[cccbbbaaa]

It’s all in the history tab.

[some_random]

If editing an article opens you up to copyright lawsuits for "destroying their work", it's completely untenable.

[true_religion]

With a moral rights framework, that depends on the content of the edit.

If for example you edit in racist views and leave the attribution of the original author because it’s just a one word change from “the holocaust” to “the alleged holocaust”, then yes you are open to a lawsuit for any harm that results from that malicious edit.

This is especially true with my example as that view would run afoul of criminal statue in many counties.

[some_random]

So that's what I assumed too but it turns out that's not true, at least in Canada. The Flight Stop example was cited as an example of an artist asserting their moral rights to their art to prevent the owner from tying bows around the necks of a his flock of fiberglass geese for the holidays. For art in Canada, modifying it at all prejudices the author. The standard for other works is higher, but still nothing as high as you think.

https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/michael-snow/key-works/flig...

Edit: I also wonder how or if this works in reverse, if someone wrote a fantastic article on numerology or whatever with a screed halfway through, would removing it from the article violate their moral rights? I think any framework where the answer is no is also probably going to be unworkable.