[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Mike Godwin]

geni writes:

> Worse than that. Technically most EU countries should have identical
> moral rights clauses. Implementation of the clauses is inconsistent
> and in many cases there is a lack of caselaw (although the lawsuit
> over changing a bridge design failed).

There's a reason for the lack of caselaw, even though implementation  
among Berne signatory countries is inconsistent -- it's that truly  
problematic moral-rights problems don't come up very much.  What's  
more, even if our own follow-through on attribution requirements of  
GFDL (or CC-BY-SA) is less than it might be, the thing to note is that  
we're actively trying to maintain attribution, even though a massively  
collaborative environment such as Wikpedia makes such an effort both  
difficult and (arguably) less than meaningful.  Most moral-rights  
disputes arise in cases where someone is actively trying to *remove*  
attribution or to *misattribute* a work.  That's not normally our  
problem.

> For the average wikipedian on the ground the issue is less one of what
> you can handle or find people to handle (I generally assume that the
> foundation can deal with pretty much any copyright issues should it
> have to)

It's nice to know somebody assumes that.



--Mike