On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 8:32 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com
wrote:
I don't claim to have made a special study of the issue, but have had it pretty much forced down my throat by circumstances. While our laws here in Finland are much worse than Iceland for instance -- and still lightyears better than current (much less projected) US legislation -- we have a nice clause in our laws that allow for "shared" attribution, when the work is a massively collaborative work, like wikipedia. The law still does not allow for the site to use TOS to circumvent moral rights, but it is very nicely fine-grained in allowing things that would be useful for wikipedia, but that is currently not available to us, because there persists this view that we are "unported" and merely acknowledge the right of countries to not adhere to the onerous and WMF-centric attribution praxis. It would be very useful for the foundation to admit, that absolutely nobody needs to attribute WMF if they just mention a few chief authors of the content.
That's basically what the Terms of Use say: "Attribution is an important part of these licenses. We consider it giving credit where credit is due – to authors like yourself. When you contribute text, you agree to be attributed in any of the following fashions: ... Through a list of all authors (but please note that any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions)." Are you suggesting that it should be changed to say "Through a list of the * major* authors"? That might not be a bad idea, although I'm not sure it's permitted by the existing CC license.
You may have missed the fact I used the term "praxis", rather than "lexis". I do want to re-iterate that what is significant is not the legal language of the TOS, but the way it is represented to the using public.