[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> has a right to attribution.  But really, setting a limit to the number of
> principal authors is meaningless anyway, because *anyone can modify the text
> without permission*, so even if you work your ass off and produce a 10,000
> word text, all a reuser has to do is take 5 other 10,001 word texts, append
> it to the end, and now you get no attribution at all.
> ...
> Only attributing "the five principal authors" is utterly unacceptable.  Only
> attributing "five of the principal authors" is utterly unacceptable.  Any
> attribution clause which doesn't ensure the attribution of *all* significant
> contributors, is unacceptable.  Within that framework I think there are a
> lot of reasonable solutions.

I was reading this thread (more or less) carefully and I was wondering
how it is possible that the direction of the discussion was toward
attribution only five persons for the whole Wikipedia (or to some part
of it, no matter). So, thanks for mentioning this.

I just may imagine an ironic smile of one my friend, a copyright
lawyer from Serbia, with the question: Would it pass at the court? :)
At least in Serbia, it would be treated as a typical example of trying
to make a fraud based on a weird interpretation of a license (or
whichever legal document) or "false contracts" (something in the
sense: "See, I killed him because we signed a contract that I may kill
him!").

However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.

So, some way for solving this problem has to be find. I mentioned in
my first post of this thread that some kind of "hard copy links", like
web links to the history of the page on Wikipedia, may be used instead
of writing all names inside of the book. Maybe it should be defined
that if the list of authors is longer than 10% of the book size, for
the rest of them, book has to refer to the (mentioned) bibliography.

And this is something which license has to solve. After solving that
issue inside of the license, we would have to convince continental
legal systems that such kind of solution is reasonable.

And, of course, I am sure that others have some other ideas how to
address this problem.