On 8/26/07, James Duncan Davidson james@duncandavidson.com wrote:
On Aug 25, 2007, at 21:22 , Matthew Brown wrote:
I think that you or the person stating that is mistaken. Even text contributions to Wikipedia do not require assignment of copyright to Wikimedia/Wikipedia. They are all copyright their original contributors. This definitely goes for images as well.
The comment was specifically about the terms of CC-By-*>=2.5 licenses. It doesn't have any relationship to what we do: because we'd never put something in our terms of service requiring attribution reassignment.
It was stated by Gregory Maxwell. It didn't match my world view, nor my understanding of the CC, but then I'm prepared to be wrong about a lot of things vis-a-vis my understanding of the CC right about now.
I wasn't speaking specifically of cases where images are uploaded to a new site by a third party. I was making the point to illustrate that the attribution requirements of the license were not as aggressive as you had believed.
I the attribution requirements in case of content under cc-by-*->=2.5 being uploaded by a third party to a site with a terms-of-service attribution override is more complex and and I'd argue that it's made very clear in the license. (Especially considering cases where the third party made a derivative, say a crop, of the original)
I won't bore you with my analysis of the license text
If you'd like to learn more about the "terms of service" part of the CC attribution licenses it's useful to look back to their origin.
The purpose of the introduction of the terms of service clause was to simplify attribution on sites with pages of many authors. They were originally introduced in the "cc-wiki" license, but the cc-wiki license was not successful and the terms were rolled into cc-by-*-2.5.
http://lessig.org/blog/2005/03/code_v20_and_the_ccwiki_licens.html