To be clear, my personal position toward any kind authorship (especially toward "moral rights") is a very negative one. In brief, I think that this is a kind of bourgeois egotism. In more details, I think that all of us own to our teachers, they own to their teachers; which, in fact, means that all of us own to all of our ancestors, from our parents to amoebas; which should be attributed as well.
But... On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 4:30 AM, Erik Moeller <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. This kind of construction makes one copyleft license in practice just a little bit stronger than public domain. It may be very useful in a case like Wikipedia articles have, but something is deeply wrong with it. In other words, in practice it says "You may do whatever you want with the content while a derivative work is still in PD and you gave a link to the original source." This is not copyleft and a lot of people are contributing here because our content is copylefted. From my amateur point of view, copylefted material is copyrighted material in a such way that it can't be closed again. Copyright means that authorship is respected. Respected authorship means that [relevant] authors are mentioned. > 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). Moral rights are not respected because: 1) If authors won't be able to say that their name should be kept -- or it won't be a widely known fact. 2) If it would be an option, authors wouldn't be represented equally. Just authors which explicitly say that they want to be attributed -- will be attributed. To resume: I am happy to see that WMF intends to make a great shift from bourgeois egotism to a reasonable attribution. But, I am quite unsure about the consequences which will be brought with it, inside of the world full of bourgeois egotism. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
