By way of top-posting a brief preamble, let me apologize if someone thinks it tacky to reply to a week old posting, but I personally needed to reflect a bit before my precise position has clarified on some issues, which I do want to address.
Erik Moeller wrote:
Flexible and vague clauses can work well when you're dealing with issues with few stakeholders who all have a shared and tacit understanding of what they want to accomplish. By definition, massive collaboration isn't such a situation: any one of hundreds or thousands of contributors to a document can behave unreasonably, interpreting rules to the detriment of others. The distributed ownership of copyright to a single work is an example of what Michael Heller calls 'gridlock' or an 'anticommons'. Ironically, even with free content licenses, the gridlock effects of copyright can still come into play.
I think the problem I have with this is the view that wikipedia is merely a massive collaboration. It certainly is that too, but we certainly have not shied away from also importing works from already published sources, while their licensing has been compatible. If it is your intention to indicate a radical shift that would forever prevent this practice, and require that all content be composed on-site, it would be useful if you came right out and said so, so we could all address this issue head on.
But there is a real problem of saying that those who have created such material under a compatible license, have also implicitly agreed with site terms of use.
I believe it's our obligation to give our reusers protection from being hassled by people insisting on heavy attribution requirements, and to create consistency in reuse guidelines. Really, WMF and its chapters can hardly develop partnerships with content reusers if we can't give clarity on what's required of them. A great deal of free information reuse may not be happening because of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I would much rather remove all doubt that our content is free to be reused without onerous restrictions.
Well, I think it would be really bad if WMF and its chapters willfully mislead their partners on what was legally required to allow reuse in the maximum of jurisdictions that are compatible with the base licensing, never mind what site terms of use say.
It is a simple inescapable fact that international laws on Intellectual Property are complex, and it is because of this that the Creative Commons accommodate multiple jurisdictions interoperability as far as possible. If it were the case that WMF in the interest of claiming to "clarify" issues, when they in fact will cloud the real complexity by expressing a false simplicity, where none obtains; well, in my personal opinion, that would not be all that useful.
Terms of use can require things beyond the licensing, I suppose, such as waiving rights, in jurisdictions where that can be done (I believe in Canada you can waive moral rights for instance), or contractually agree to not pursue some rights, even though they theoretically are still yours, but that still leaves jurisdictions where moral rights are inalienable, and the conundrum of content not created under site terms of use, but merely imported under a license which would be compatible with the license our content would be under, but not under any reasonable understanding of the terms of use further requirements to rescind some rights that are not impinged upon by the license itself.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen