First, right up top (not top posting; but noting something intentionally at the top of this posting), let me acknowledge that responding to one of ones own postings is considered bad form. But in my defense I will note that I am genuinely not doing so in order to prolong a thread well past its sale by date, but to correct an inadvertent error I had made, which can be of some significance, after I was informed of it.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To me, this looks reasonable.
It's a lot less unreasonable than many suggestions! :-)
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
I think it is useful to note that even in countries where moral rights are inalienable, there is a requirement of "originality" and "creative effort".
Just recently there was a question put to the Finnish "Mr. Intellectual Property law" (Jukka Kemppinen, who quite by the by, was one of the speakers at the seminar to mark 100 000 articles in the Finnish language wikipedia) on whether a text message could be considered to be sufficiently original to constitute a "work" as defined in the authors rights legislation. The situation was related to a tabloid publishing obscene text messages a government minister had sent to an exotic dancer.
According to Jukka Kemppinen, a simple two line obscene rhyming text message "Älä luota muihin, ota multa suihin." - giving a completely hypothetical example - would be quite sufficient to be a "work". (and no, I won't translate the message).
But I am sure there are no applicable moral rights to let's say correcting missing space around punctuation.
I have made some studies, and it appears this last sentence is in fact complete bollocks. (xcuse my french)
There is a frequently expressed view that the moral rights provision of "paternity rights" are there to protect the authors right to be identified as the originator of the work, but it is in fact (according to a finding by Finnish copyrights protection arbitration committee - which of course has no actual legal standing as a binding precedent on later court cases) somewhat more involved.
TN 1991:7 states that the paternity right extends to the level of making it obligatory to not only mention if the original authors work has been tampered in some way (adapted, translated, modified, whatever; choose your own term) but to identify specifically by whom, if known.
This is a very strong finding, though as far as I know untested in an actual court of law here.
I am sure most cases of shuffling punctuation around and such is not something that can be considered creative acts, but certainly they would qualify as modifications. And I was recently reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" (published as "The Snake" in The Republican) had a change of a single punctuation mark, which in her own view changed the meaning of it completely on its head; so even a mechanical application of considering punctuation changes as minor, is not universally defensible.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen