On 12 December 2011 20:05, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 12/12/2011 3:02 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
I think what he means is that under most European copyright regimes, an author has far-reaching personality rights, which include the right to have the work accredited to them whenever it is republished. The terms of use, in his feeling, hollow out this right by redefining the obligatory credit part of the GFL and CC-BY-SA in such a way that one can mention all authors by doing something that does not include mentioning any of them.
That may be the case, but any contributions to the projects is made under an unequivocal grants of permission to redistribute under those terms; the TOS only restate the inevitable, they're not putting forth any new concept there.
I believe in certain jurisdictions such terms are automatically null and void. The moral rights can't be waived. I expect that is the cause of the objection.
I'm not really sure what alternative we have, though. We switched to the current license terms because we realised requiring re-users to credit every single person that made a non-trivial edit to the page was impractical and hardly any re-users were actually doing that. In the jurisdictions in question, re-users probably have no choice, but I guess that just means it is impractical to re-use Wikipedia legally in those jurisdictions.