To be clear, my personal position toward any kind authorship
(especially toward "moral rights") is a very negative one. In brief, I
think that this is a kind of bourgeois egotism. In more details, I
think that all of us own to our teachers, they own to their teachers;
which, in fact, means that all of us own to all of our ancestors, from
our parents to amoebas; which should be attributed as well.
But...
On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 4:30 AM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
1) Part 1: Can attribution-by-link be reconciled with
the legal code
of CC-BY-SA?
Answer: Yes. The "attribution by link" option was explicitly made
available to authors in CC-BY-SA 2.0 (note difference in section 4.c:
http://tinyurl.com/cvdbe9 and related blog entry:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216 ). Authors also have the
option to not supply an author name for the purposes of attribution
("the Original Author if supplied"). The attribution requirements are
also tempered by the caveat that they should be "reasonable to the
medium or means", building in flexibility for situations where, for
example, providing attribution to all authors directly isn't feasible
or reasonable.
Therefore terms of use which require authors to agree to be credited
by link, and not by name, are consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA.
This entire reasoning has been explicitly confirmed by Creative Commons
General Counsel Diane Peters.
This kind of construction makes one copyleft license in practice just
a little bit stronger than public domain. It may be very useful in a
case like Wikipedia articles have, but something is deeply wrong with
it. In other words, in practice it says "You may do whatever you want
with the content while a derivative work is still in PD and you gave a
link to the original source."
This is not copyleft and a lot of people are contributing here because
our content is copylefted. From my amateur point of view, copylefted
material is copyrighted material in a such way that it can't be closed
again. Copyright means that authorship is respected. Respected
authorship means that [relevant] authors are mentioned.
2) Part 2: Can such an attribution model be reconciled
with moral
rights provisions in certain jurisdictions?
Answer: Yes. Moral rights provisions protect an author's right to be
named, but allow flexibility in how such attribution occurs (for
example, there is a long history of case law with regard to
pseudonymous attribution). As long as authors consent to
terms of use requiring attribution by hyperlink, such attribution is
consistent with moral rights. Such consent has already been given
for existing edits (see below).
Moral rights are not respected because:
1) If authors won't be able to say that their name should be kept --
or it won't be a widely known fact.
2) If it would be an option, authors wouldn't be represented equally.
Just authors which explicitly say that they want to be attributed --
will be attributed.
To resume: I am happy to see that WMF intends to make a great shift
from bourgeois egotism to a reasonable attribution. But, I am quite
unsure about the consequences which will be brought with it, inside of
the world full of bourgeois egotism.