Erik Moeller wrote: > A compromise could acknowledge the principle that attribution should > never be unreasonably onerous explicitly (a principle which, as Geni > has pointed out, is arguably already encoded in the CC-BY-SA license's > "reasonable to the medium or means" provision), commit us to work > together to provide attribution records of manageable length using > smart algorithms as well as documenting minimally complex attribution > implementations, and permit by-URL attribution in circumstances where > we don't have a better answer yet. I worry, in this scenario, about > instruction and complexity creep over time, so the fundamental > principles of simplicity would need to be articulated well. And I want > to make sure that we don't embark on a compromise which achieves > nothing: that the vocal minority who feel very strongly about > attribution-by-name under all circumstances will continue to object, > that we will increase complexity for re-users, and that we will not > actually persuade anyone to support the approach who wouldn't > otherwise do so. >
Firstly let me say that I couldn't find one word of your posting that I disagreed with :-) My hat is really off to you for putting everything so pellucidly clearly and eloquently. And just to remove all doubt, I am being entirely earnest here, this is not sarcasm. Your posting really did you proud. I do want to underscore that last sentence though, just to clarify where I personally stand. My stance has ever been that what we should not do is break interoperability for a significant segment of jurisdictions where our work could reasonably be expected to be distributed to. I do not hold that we should satisfy even the legal requirements of all jurisdictions. I can easily envision that there might be a really stupid law somewhere, which made genuinely onerous demands. I would certainly suggest in that case that after careful consideration, WMF should just flip them the bird, and say: grow up, smell the internet age! In fact personally I'd hope that Intellectual Property laws around the world were much more internet age savvy than they are at the present. But we needs must live in the world we have got, and not the one we would wish existed. And just to very briefly recap what I have said about my own jurisdiction; my understanding is that here the laws are not that onerous, though they are a bit quirkily different from other jurisdictions (surprise!). We don't have fair dealing or fair use, but we do have citation rights. And the Moral Rights provision of inalienable "Paternity" to a work has a few "in the fashion common to the field and in accordance with good manners" outs to attribution in addition to a (far too complex, IMO) set of labyrinthine considerations as to what really is a "work" that one can have that paternity right to. There is even an explicit concept of "shared" paternity for collaborations, which would in many cases fit wikipedia splendidly; though not in the case of importing stuff previously published elsewhere under a compatible license, for instance. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
