On 17/07/13 10:11, Sriram Karra wrote:

We recently received an email from WT's legal team telling us that the license requires us to attribute WT. The letter goes on to say: "In view of the foregoing, Internet Brands, Inc. hereby demands you cease and desist copying content from Wikitravel.org, unless you provide proper attribution to wikitravel.org as the original content creator."

As much as I hate to use the word "fraud" here, Wikitravel is not the content creator. The content was created by individual users.

We do not copy WT content and have no intention of doing so. So this is a bit strange. While we are getting legal opinion on this matter, my questions for the WV community:

1. Why do WV articles attribute WT?

That only appears on content which contains text that had been contributed pseudonymously by "user:so-and-so at Wikitravel" and was moved to Wikivoyage Foundation servers in 2012. A new page, such as http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Lac-Mégantic&oldid=2334647 (created eight days ago to claim the whole town as "closed off" and "torched" due to a recent train derailment) does not attribute WT as there is no corresponding WT page.

Our obligation is to identify the author. The license terms are here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The use of pseudonyms is awkward as the same username might belong to someone else on some other website. That's the only reason we mention "(WT-en) username" and not "username" for attribution until we verify both to be the same user.

2. Does WT own the copyright for the content that was published till the time of the fork? It was my understanding the the original authors owned the copyright and the history file was the way for providing attribution.

WT owns nothing. They paid $1.7 million for a domain name and registered a corresponding trademark. The content belongs to its authors - individual users, which IB is not lawfully entitled to claim as unpaid employees. The authors are entitled to attribution (hence CC-BY-SA) and providing the history (or a link to the history) meets that requirement.

Wikivoyage has retained the complete edit history for every page.

3. Are there any known cases of such WV content usage that "attribute" the parent WT article in addition to WV?

I know of none. I'd expect the issue would come up with Wikipedia where articles are often translated from one language to another. In Wikipedia, [[en:Lac-Mégantic]] is a translation of [[fr:Lac-Mégantic]]. Countless mirror sites rebrand English-language Wikipedia content as the "answers.com" or "nationmaster" or whatever site encyclopedia; those mirrors "attribute" the English Wikipedia to comply with CC-BY-SA but don't spell out "mais cette page vient avant ça de la Wikipédia en français: as en.WP already provides that information on the article talk page. (Each language is an independent project, so the attribution requirements are the same)