On 12 December 2011 16:18, Teofilo <teofilowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: It came to the list, but the archiving bit of Mailman loses the entire message after any line that starts with the word "From", i.e. the very beginning of your message. - d.

Impressive! Fred

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 8:25 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> 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. -- André Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com

On 12 December 2011 20:05, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote: 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.

On 12/13/11 9:02 AM, geni wrote: It can often be done on paper (and easily on the web), but it's not very convenient for audio, i.e. spoken wikipedia articles. In the days of the GFDL you not only had to recite the entire list of contributors, but also the full text of the GFDL! Our primary goal should be to spread knowledge, not to ensure that we are prominently credited as individuals. Proper attribution is important, but it shouldn't be a higher priority than making our content easy to reuse and disseminate in a wide variety of mediums. Using a URL allows attribution without creating a hardship for the reuser. This has the added benefit of allowing us to enforce our terms firmly and consistantly, rather than carving out exceptions for various cases and having inconsistencies between what we require on paper and what we actually expect from reusers. Ryan Kaldari

On 12/13/11 12:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Actually, I was suggesting the opposite: that in many cases (in the GFDL days) we carved out exceptions (unofficially) to allow people to reuse our content without meeting the full requirements of the license (much less the moral rights requirements). If you've ever taken a look at... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GFDL_Compliance and its associated talk page, you'll see that the en.wiki community at least treated license compliance as a fairly gray issue, i.e. there was some degree of allowance for "trying to comply" rather than actually complying, due to the fact that few reusers were willing to list all the contributors (even on websites, where space is cheap). I have no idea if the same was true for the position of the Foundation's legal department, but I suspect it was. (I'm just guessing though.) It looks like the main areas where URL attribution would be an issue are Commonwealth countries. In the rest of the world, moral rights are either non-existent, or not waivable. Is there any Commonwealth caselaw on what types of attribution are acceptable for satisfying moral rights? Ryan Kaldari

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: If it is unofficial, it sounds a bit grandiose to term the action as "carving out". English language usage would be to use the phrase "turn a blind eye". And "if" as you previously claimed, the moral rights requirements are implicit in the full licence requirements, why would you argue that stating them in the TOS is redundant, but now seem to imply that the moral rights are more stringent than the licence. Either moral rights are contained in the licence, or not. I really hope 4.0 brings clarity, and also that WMF will go forward from an unported licence to a fully internationalized TOS implementation, the sooner the better. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

I've actually been doing a lot of research on the history of copyright law on-wiki - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ironholds/statute for example - and I've been focusing on the Berne Convention, later on. The rationale for encyclopaedias (something that is not just common law, but in some nations, statutory) is essentially that; encyclopedias contain thousands of tiny, two-line long articles, and attribution is a bitch. On 14 December 2011 06:09, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: -- Oliver Keyes Community Liason, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com That's basically what the Terms of Use say: "Attribution is an important part of these licenses. We consider it giving credit where credit is due – to authors like yourself. When you contribute text, you agree to be attributed in any of the following fashions: ... Through a list of all authors (but please note that any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions)." Are you suggesting that it should be changed to say "Through a list of the * major* authors"? That might not be a bad idea, although I'm not sure it's permitted by the existing CC license. And just to clear up a common misconception, the Foundation has never asked for attribution to the Foundation. It does sound like the copyright laws of Finland are more modern than what we have in the States. However, there are two problems with using the ported CC licenses. First, they introduce license incompatibilities. They are often just 1-way compatible with the unported licenses, and sometimes incompatible with other ported licenses, although there is disagreement as to the details. The other problem is that Creative Commons has had a hard time keeping the ported licenses maintained and up to date. This is why most of the ported licenses are still at version 2.0. From the Creative Commons FAQ: "Porting is a demanding process that requires a lot of resources and time by both CC and the porting team" "Please note that as of 2011 CC no longer approves new license porting projects" For those two reasons, I personally think it makes more sense to stick with the unported CC-BY-SA license for now. The idea of having a ported Terms of Use, however, might be more doable, but I'd like to hear the legal team's opinion on this as they probably have a much better idea of what that would entail (and if there would really be tangible benefits from this). Ryan Kaldari

That's the whole point of free licenses—you're giving up some of your rights to your work. This doesn't have anything to do with European vs. American copyright law. I checked the wording in the existing terms of service and it's exactly the same. Ryan Kaldari On 12/12/11 12:02 PM, Andre Engels wrote:

I suppose we could add a disclaimer saying that the Terms of Use do not affect the editor's moral rights, although this would be a bit redundant since the CC-BY-SA license already states this. Ryan Kaldari On 12/12/11 12:42 PM, Maggie Dennis wrote:

On 12 December 2011 20:54, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: The problem is that the intent is to trash the editor's moral rights. In fact that term would be a particular problem in the UK where it is just about possible that you might be able to give up your moral rights via click through so the inclusion of such a term would rather spoil the intent. -- geni