alt Hacker NewsHow 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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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.
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.
> 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.