2009/3/18 geni <[email protected]>: > 1 person on this list. The rest of the opposition comes from the > foundations unlawful and ill thought out proposed TOS.
For the record, our legal reasoning for the attribution terms under consideration is as follows (as reviewed by Mike). 1) Part 1: Can attribution-by-link be reconciled with the legal code of CC-BY-SA? Answer: Yes. The "attribution by link" option was explicitly made available to authors in CC-BY-SA 2.0 (note difference in section 4.c: http://tinyurl.com/cvdbe9 and related blog entry: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216 ). Authors also have the option to not supply an author name for the purposes of attribution ("the Original Author if supplied"). The attribution requirements are also tempered by the caveat that they should be "reasonable to the medium or means", building in flexibility for situations where, for example, providing attribution to all authors directly isn't feasible or reasonable. Therefore terms of use which require authors to agree to be credited by link, and not by name, are consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. This entire reasoning has been explicitly confirmed by Creative Commons General Counsel Diane Peters. 2) Part 2: Can such an attribution model be reconciled with moral rights provisions in certain jurisdictions? Answer: Yes. Moral rights provisions protect an author's right to be named, but allow flexibility in how such attribution occurs (for example, there is a long history of case law with regard to pseudonymous attribution). As long as authors consent to terms of use requiring attribution by hyperlink, such attribution is consistent with moral rights. Such consent has already been given for existing edits (see below). 3) Part 3: Is such an attribution model consistent with the past practice under which authors have contributed to Wikipedia and other projects? Answer: Yes. This is evident through the current site-wide copyright terms, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights . Even the earliest available version of the Wikipedia:Copyrights policy which stated re-users obligations said that users' "obligations can be fulfilled by providing a conspicuous link back to the home of the article here at wikipedia.com." [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Copyrights&oldid=159593] Similar terms have been stated through the history of the policy, as well as other language versions. In addition to the site-wide terms of use, the consistency of this practice can also be inferred from the experience of a user contributing content to Wikipedia or another Wikimedia website. Such changes are not visibly credited to the contributor on the resultant page. Indeed, the only way in which contributors are credited in Wikipedia is through a history of changes. This history is a full view of every change ever made to a page, often spanning multiple pages, including irrelevant edits, and providing no obvious means to discern contributors who have made substantial edits. Authors do not receive attribution by name in any conventional fashion, such as by being listed below the article title or in the page footer. In the exploratory Wikimedia Foundation survey on attribution, some users even pointed out that if they ever expected to be credited for their work, they would have chosen a different username. Therefore, an argument that a contributor has a reasonable expectation to be attributed beyond the proposed terms is not supportable by past and current practice. That said, these terms have always been inconsistent with the rigorous requirements of the GFDL, and while the terms of use and real-world practice can be understood to establish the actual conditions of re-use, CC-BY-SA guarantees full consistency of the longstanding attribution model with the content license. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
