I've actually been doing a lot of research on the history of copyright law on-wiki - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ironholds/statute for example - and I've been focusing on the Berne Convention, later on. The rationale for encyclopaedias (something that is not just common law, but in some nations, statutory) is essentially that; encyclopedias contain thousands of tiny, two-line long articles, and attribution is a bitch.
On 14 December 2011 06:09, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
Sorry about the confusion. I was talking most recently about the GFDL, which does not mention moral rights. CC-BY-SA does mention moral rights (to state that it does not affect them). Interestingly, the U.S. port of the CC-BY-SA license does not include a disclaimer about moral rights, but this is irrelevant since the WMF uses the unported license, not the U.S. version. The unported license is designed to be legally useful in as many countries as possible, and during the 4.0 draft process they are hoping to improve this aspect of the license. From everything I've heard, Creative Commons is hoping to move away from ported licenses, as these have been a major headache for everyone, especially in regards to license compatibility. The idea to have numerous localized Terms of Use for Wikipedia (based on the laws of each country) is an interesting idea. It would probably be a nightmare to maintain, but we've managed worse. I would love to hear Geoff's thoughts on this.
Getting back to your original point, I suppose it's true that the Terms of Service could affect the protection of moral rights (in certain countries), even if the license explicitly doesn't. However, after doing more research into this, it looks like it's a moot issue. Moral rights (per Common law) are for the protection of literary and artistic works, not factual reference works. Works like encyclopedias, dictionaries, newspaper articles, etc. are not covered by moral rights. I imagine the reasoning behind this is that such works entail a minimum degree of creative "authorship" and are often published without attribution. If I'm mistaken in this conclusion, please let me know.
Ryan Kaldari
On 12/13/11 7:56 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Ryan Kaldarirkaldari@wikimedia.org
wrote:
On 12/13/11 12:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Using an URL does allow the semblance of attribution, but does not fulfil the legal requirements of moral rights. I find it mildly distasteful, that other jurisdictions laws are referred to as "exceptions for various
cases",
when CC itself has committed itself to better internationalisation in
its
4.0 version.
Actually, I was suggesting the opposite: that in many cases (in the GFDL days) we carved out exceptions (unofficially) to allow people to reuse our content without meeting the full requirements of the license (much less the moral rights requirements).
If it is unofficial, it sounds a bit grandiose to term the action as
"carving
out". English language usage would be to use the phrase "turn a blind
eye".
And "if" as you previously claimed, the moral rights requirements are
implicit
in the full licence requirements, why would you argue that stating them in the TOS is redundant, but now seem to imply that the moral rights are more stringent than the licence. Either moral rights are contained in the licence, or not. I really hope 4.0 brings clarity, and also that WMF
will go
forward from an unported licence to a fully internationalized TOS implementation, the sooner the better.
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