[Foundation-l] Commons Usurp issue

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 6:19 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/6/4 George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>:
>> I don't think we've ever interpreted the GFDL in the sense that the
>> author credits have to be invariant.  Just accurate enough and
>> traceable enough.  The GFDL doesn't require an absolute here...
>>
>> I believe that you're inventing a problem where none exists...
>
> It requires invariant.  The GFDL is full of invariant sections both
> accidental and deliberate. "Preserve the section Entitled "History""
> "Preserve all the copyright notices " I really don't see a court going
> for accepting the license meant accurate enough to be traceable.
>
> But you are right no problem exists. If you want one name across all
> projects just pick a unique name.

What it actually says:
# B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or
entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the
Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors
of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than
five), unless they release you from this requirement.
...
# I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and
add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and
publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there
is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating
the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on
its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as
stated in the previous sentence.


We don't exactly follow the as-written rule there because we can't -
the history page for an article is not a Title Page or a section
entitled "History", as it's a live wiki and not a paper document.

Further, the "Preserve" doesn't say "Invariantly preserve", which
other things do explicitly.

Usurpation is a special case of user account name changes.  A
voluntary name change violates the explicit interpretation you're
arguing of the license, too.  We allow those...

If an usurped account owner complains, along these lines, our
counterargument is "We still list (your account / identity) in the
article history, though we've changed the displayed text string for
it.  That's all we do for anyone, ever."

In the enwiki BNB discussion Robert Rhode pointed to, see the
following statement by Carl, which sums up what I think about this:

"As to whether it breaks GFDL to change someone's name, I think we can
fall back on the argument that when someone contributes to they
implicitly grant us permission to change things for the purpose of
administering the site (this is also the reason, I believe, that we
don't worry about other minor GFDL issues such as accidentally lost
attribution, etc.). If you feel renaming users against their will is
an issue, it would be more compelling to everyone if you could
convince Mike Godwin to comment on it, especially since other projects
appear to do so, and so if it's a GFDL violation they need to change
their practices. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:21, 20 May 2008 (UTC)"

The community should not be making trouble for ourselves by trying to
worst-case interpret corner cases of the GFDL restrictions.  We've had
to interpret in a pragmantic manner.  If there's a problem, bring it
to Mike, who can talk to the FSF folks or just interpret on his own
and let us know if there is legitimately a problem or if we're just
stressing ourselves out for the fun of it.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com