On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/19 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com:
Without disagreeing on the importance of attribution standards per se, it is clearly inaccurate to say that they signify how we interpret the license. Contributors can be asked to waive rights to content they add to the site (where they are the sole originators of the material, and not merely importing content that has already been published elsewhere) even above and beyond the terms of the specific license, and equally they can be asked to not pursue some rights specified in the license, where such contractual stipulations are legal. Not that it is clear how enforceable such stipulations or waivers would be, if reusers asserted a different understanding of the license and/or the IP laws of their specific jurisdiction.
But sometimes people will be important content that has already been published elsewhere. At best, we're going to have people having to go through the edit history line by line if they want to use content under GFDL, if we add in addition terms of use people will have to go through line by line if they want to do anything using them too. It's really not an option.
On this issue, I largely agree with Thomas, though I would frame the question differently.
In my opinion, it is incumbent upon us to give examples of how we believe third parties can legally and practically reuse WMF content by exercising rights under CC-BY-SA. If we can't, in our collective wisdom, agree on how third parties ought to be able to accomplish that under the new license, then the license is probably inadequate for our needs.
Now we don't have to cover every way that CC-BY-SA might be used. And we don't have to go through every possible complication that might occur with wiki content. But I do think we must be prepared to give concrete examples of how the license may be used in common applications, and that requires being willing to confront the question of "reasonable" attribution.
If someone comes to us and says: "I want to print a copy of [[France]] in my book. What is a reasonable way to comply with the license?", then we really ought to be able to answer that question. If we can't agree on an acceptable answer to that question under CC-BY-SA, then we probably shouldn't be considering adopting it.
For the record, I am open to the idea that we might well be able to get nearly everyone to agree on a set of "reasonable" usage guidelines consistent with the terms and spirit of CC-BY-SA, but I agree with Thomas that it is important that we address that either before or concurrent with the relicensing effort.
-Robert Rohde