On 17/07/13 10:11, Sriram Karra wrote:
We recently received an email from WT's legal team
telling us that the
license requires us to attribute WT. The letter goes on to say: "In
view of the foregoing, Internet Brands, Inc. hereby demands you cease
and desist copying content from
Wikitravel.org
<http://Wikitravel.org>, unless you provide proper attribution
to
wikitravel.org as the original content creator."
As much as I hate to use the word "fraud" here, Wikitravel is not the
content creator. The content was created by individual users.
We do not copy WT content and have no intention of
doing so. So this
is a bit strange. While we are getting legal opinion on this matter,
my questions for the WV community:
1. Why do WV articles attribute WT?
That only appears on content which contains text that had been
contributed pseudonymously by "user:so-and-so at Wikitravel" and was
moved to Wikivoyage Foundation servers in 2012. A new page, such as
http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Lac-Mégantic&oldid=2334647
(created eight days ago to claim the whole town as "closed off" and
"torched" due to a recent train derailment) does not attribute WT as
there is no corresponding WT page.
Our obligation is to identify the author. The license terms are here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The use of pseudonyms is awkward as the same username might belong to
someone else on some other website. That's the only reason we mention
"(WT-en) username" and not "username" for attribution until we verify
both to be the same user.
2. Does WT own the copyright for the content that was
published till
the time of the fork? It was my understanding the the original authors
owned the copyright and the history file was the way for providing
attribution.
WT owns nothing. They paid $1.7 million for a domain name and registered
a corresponding trademark. The content belongs to its authors -
individual users, which IB is not lawfully entitled to claim as unpaid
employees. The authors are entitled to attribution (hence CC-BY-SA) and
providing the history (or a link to the history) meets that requirement.
Wikivoyage has retained the complete edit history for every page.
3. Are there any known cases of such WV content usage
that "attribute"
the parent WT article in addition to WV?
I know of none. I'd expect the issue
would come up with Wikipedia where
articles are often translated from one language to another. In
Wikipedia, [[en:Lac-Mégantic]] is a translation of [[fr:Lac-Mégantic]].
Countless mirror sites rebrand English-language Wikipedia content as the
"answers.com" or "nationmaster" or whatever site encyclopedia; those
mirrors "attribute" the English Wikipedia to comply with CC-BY-SA but
don't spell out "mais cette page vient avant ça de la Wikipédia en
français: as en.WP already provides that information on the article talk
page. (Each language is an independent project, so the attribution
requirements are the same)