David Gerard wrote:
2009/3/9 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 9:28 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/9 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Should we treat such persons systematically or it is better to add some exceptional rules? Something like to give a mandate to WMF to solve problems of types like giving a formal permission to the government of Central African Republic (or to some NGO which operates there) to print Wikipedia editions in English and Swahili without any attribution (even they don't need it). Or for spoken editions for education of blind persons?
There is no legal way to do that nor is there any real benefit in doing so.
If the present options are between linking to the history of article at Wikipedia up to the full attribution, I don't see any reason why the whole range can't be applied in the ToS. (And, yes, I made a mistake with mentioning "no attribution at all".)
In copyright law and the terms of the CC by-sa, WMF can't actually promise something like that in terms of what they own and don't own.
Remember that licenses are not merely a game of Nomic, but responses to a given legal threat model.
In this case, the threat model is: what if some raving and/or malicious lunatic who has copyright on a piece of this thing drags someone into court over it?
I really think it would be worth the time spent for each person who has discussed this matter on this list to go and re-read the interview of Lawrence Lessig (the founder of the CC, for those coming in late to the game), conducted by Wikimedia Quarto a few years ago - and if there are people who have participated in this discussion who have not yet read it, it is *vital* for them to do so, to be informed.
The reason for the license is so that the defendant can point at the license and say "I can do this per the license." (And probably "and per common practice," because law is squishier than Nomic.)
So the aims of the suggested terms for relicensing will not be to achieve some theoretical outcome that makes everyone as happy as possible, but to provide sufficient results to be usable in terms of:
- giving reusers confidence they can defend themselves against a
raving and/or malicious lunatic in court; 2. not pissing off so much of the community they fork.
To clarify number 2.; you probably mean to say a pissing off a viable cross-section of the community so they fork *en masse* from the _WMF_.
There have been been and will always be forks, but these are typically forks from the community as a whole, and not forks that leave the _WMF_ non-viable, or moribund.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen