2009/1/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
A lot of the problems you are having there are because you are trying to group things into "print" and "online". The correct dichotomy is "online" and "offline". Of course you are going to have problems classifying DVDs if your classifaction systems assumes all electronic data is only available on the internet. I don't see a problem with listing authors in fairly small print on the back of a t-shirt, seems perfectly reasonable to me. If instead of names there's just a URL on the t-shirt, does that mean I can't where it in China since people seeing it won't have any way (without significant technical know-how) to view the list of authors?
Nor would you be able to access the list of authors on a mirror that carries it by reference. Whether you draw the distinction between print or non-print, or between "online" and "offline", is always somewhat arbitrary, as content can change from one state to another very easily. (A file downloaded to your harddisk becomes an offline copy; so does an email attachment.) A licensing regime that relies on such arbitrary transformations of attribution is fundamentally unworkable for re-users.