[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> I find it interesting to see how this thread is being weaved. If I read Erik
> correctly, he is asking us what appropriate attribution is. He is asking any
> and all observations. What I find is a thread about existing legalities.
>   

You are not wholly accurate. There is discussion about laws
which refer to the *fact* of law, that it is impossible to rely
on some copyleft "wishes" (which aren't really provisions
in those jurisdictions, no matter how one might click ones
red shoes together at the heels), when there are more
strict moral rights in play in those jurisdictions. Personally
I find it entirely appropriate in terms of attribution, that we
don't present un-necessary problems to downstream users.

The downstream users have to deal with legal facts on the
ground.

It would certainly be an evil trifecta for us, to ignore certain
facts of morality. We shouldn't do it because we *want*
people to safely re-use our content. We shouldn't do it
because we respect the fact that there is a genuinely
good reason why attribution is *the right thing* to do.
And thirdly, we shouldn't do it, because generous
attribution is a genuine incentive and an argument
in favour of wikipedia, in comparison to many other
compendia, which only list the whole list of contributors,
without specifying to which articles in their work they
have added wordage. (EB Micropaedia being a case in
point).



> When we observe the current practice, you find that people attribute by
> referring to Wikipedia. This is an effective way of providing access to any
> and all the people who have contributed to what has been used. When you read
> the byzantine requirements under the different licenses, you have to be a
> lawyer to understand them properly and there is no tooling to help you
> define such things as "principal author" or the five most significant
> authors.
>   
This is a nice fiction, but not true, if a downstream user, which
I think is the focus in ultimo, is going for a fixed published media.
Linking is good, if what you have is on the internets, but if not,
not so hot. You are not provided access, if you can't follow the
link.

> If all we can do is discuss how things are currently legal, then we are not
> looking for something that works practically. It is for practical reasons
> that I wonder about the number of trees that have to be felled to attribute.
> Certainly when you have a print of all the Wikipedia articles on the popes
> of Rome and all the Christian saints and martyrs, you have a long list of
> articles that may all need their own attribution. When you approach these
> articles as a single work, you do no justice to the individual article and
> its authors.
>   

Now, this I find quite silly on several grounds. First you
mentioned linking to history, and now you shift ground
and talk about felling trees. If you are felling trees, you
can't link to the history, to save your argument.

One might quite more legitimately worry about the amount
of trees that have to be felled to include citations, references
etc. In short, this argument is very poor indeed.

Do not be blinded by the fact that moral rights are
recognized in law, from the fact, that they are recognized
as such, because of a strong ethical foundation. Slavery not
being nice is not just a fact of law, there are strands and roots
deepset into general philosophy and ethology.


> Really, why are we not talking about how this is to WORK for the people that
> will use our data.. Please remember that this is what we do it for.

I think this is a case where asking the doctor to heal themselves
is not totally amiss...


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen