On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Oliver Keyes <oke...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > I've actually been doing a lot of research on the history of copyright law > on-wiki - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ironholds/statute for > example - and I've been focusing on the Berne Convention, later on. The > rationale for encyclopaedias (something that is not just common law, but in > some nations, statutory) is essentially that; encyclopedias contain > thousands of tiny, two-line long articles, and attribution is a bitch.
I don't claim to have made a special study of the issue, but have had it pretty much forced down my throat by circumstances. While our laws here in Finland are much worse than Iceland for instance -- and still lightyears better than current (much less projected) US legislation -- we have a nice clause in our laws that allow for "shared" attribution, when the work is a massively collaborative work, like wikipedia. The law still does not allow for the site to use TOS to circumvent moral rights, but it is very nicely fine-grained in allowing things that would be useful for wikipedia, but that is currently not available to us, because there persists this view that we are "unported" and merely acknowledge the right of countries to not adhere to the onerous and WMF-centric attribution praxis. It would be very useful for the foundation to admit, that absolutely nobody needs to attribute WMF if they just mention a few chief authors of the content. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
