Different people are going to have very different views as to how diplomatic we should be when we find people who are using our work but not complying with the license. As long as the movement doesn't invest in enforcing the relatively minor conditions involved in CC-BY-SA and we leave enforcement to the individual, we can expect that responses to people who don't respect our copyrights will range from very diplomatic to the reverse. With those of us like myself who never write to people who use my work without attribution being at least partially protected by those who take a much stricter view of copyright breaches.

If we want more consistency in the way we deal with people who breach our copyrights, one possible solution is to get the WMF to employ some people to defend our Intellectual Property rights. It would be difficult to insist that people who want stricter enforcement leave the issue to WMF IP enforcement, though I suspect some would. But unless we start insisting that all contributions are dual licensed CC0 as well as any other license we shouldn't complain about people who don't consider that their contributions were dual licensed CC0.

I suspect the main effect of the WMF writing to organisations that use our work without attribution would be for more attribution and more links back to Commons. Sometimes there may be an offer to pay what a stock photo site would charge, I suspect that many of us would be happy to donate such fees to the WMF. I can understand reluctance on the part of the WMF and some of its detractors to set up a new department and take on a new role. But getting more attribution to our sites and our contributors isn't just an opportunity to get some money and encourage more traffic to our sites. Many of us are at least partly motivated by seeing our work in use and attributed to us. Investing in encouraging more organisations to comply with CC-BY-SA when reusing our contributions may be better thought of as an editor retention program not an IP defence program.

In the spirit of being bold I have started a submission on this for a roundtable discussion at Montreal. I hope that others on this list will be equally bold and put themselves down as speakers.

https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/How_do_we_encourage_reu...

WSC

Message: 4 Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2017 07:06:35 -0700 From: Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] a second commons, prevent cease and desist business Message-ID: <CAGToUqz+JUKQ_NDGpkbaRYjaKhMYZAW6_gF5ekJihKBBXRSPVA@mail.gmail. com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Thanks for the specific examples.

I'm not a German speaker, and I know context and nuance can be lost in machine translation. That being said, the one about someone who was offering attribution and then got slapped with a bill for a simple technical error is very disturbing. Especially since as brought up before, a direct link would always lack the attribution contained on an accompanying page.

The simple fact that it's legal doesn't change anything. It would be legal for me to create a website that doxxes editors. But I still would likely be banned if I did that. If the best defense you can offer for your actions is "It's not actually illegal!", that's a pretty lame defense.

I don't know if either de.wp or Commons have the idea of "bringing the project into disrepute" being a reason to exclude someone from the project. But if they do, using legal demands rather than polite requests as a first resort and a trap to make a buck seem to qualify.

I have no issue with editors asserting their legal rights if someone fails or refuses to accede to a request to bring material into license compliance, or if someone is acting in bad faith and their noncompliance is clearly deliberate. But the request should always be the first step, and if they do what was asked, that should be the end of it. That's especially true for those who made a good faith effort to comply and simply made a mistake in doing so.

Todd