Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
As far as I understood this is not mandatory information but only recommended stuff.
One fact is that identification of the author and of his year of death is very important for copyright law since his work will fall into public domain 70 years after he died.
But there is nothing mandatory in these informations !
Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Legal CERSA-CNRS PARIS 2
Is there any reason why we should not collect this information as voluntary information fields on the user configuration page? Are there any realisitc legal roadblocks or some other reason why this information should not be there associated with the contributions to each change with the Wikimedia projects?
This seems as though I'm asking for identification numbers like Social Security numbers, bank account information, or other related information. I am not. What I am asking for is that if you want to claim copyright on your contribution, you need to give this minimum amount of information for legal protection and to give a realistic copyright claim on your contributions. As it stands right now, there is no way that you can realisticly claim copyright on any of your contributions right now, and certainly there is no way that you can resolve potential copyright claims on material if it goes to court in a dispute.
I really don't see what the big deal about this is anyway. If you want to be an anonymous contributor... even with a "registered user" account, that is still possible. That will not be taken away, but at the same time you can't be anonymous and maintain control of copyright. Those are mutually exclusive issues. And all content for Wikimedia projects is copyrighted... just with generous redistrubtion licenses available to anybody who is interested.
I guess it will take a formal legal disupte to force the issue here, but by then it will be too late. I would be willing to be an "expert witness" for a plaintiff willing to invalidate copyright claims for anybody who has currently done contributions toward Wikimedia Foundation projects right now.