[Foundation-l] Problems with the new license TOS

[Dan Rosenthal]

A pet peeve of mine; I don't think telling anyone what THEY know or  
don't know over the internet is worthwhile in most cases.

-Dan
On Apr 14, 2009, at 1:13 PM, Brian wrote:

>> the archives are mostly useless as a knowledge base.
>
> This is false and you know it. Several of these questions *have* been
> debated here and with a few simple searches you could be well on  
> your way to
> reading the discussions.
>
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 7:35 AM, Tisza Gergő <gtisza at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> I found a few apparent legal problems while translating the license
>> update documents. Apologies if these have already been discussed to
>> death - I didn't follow earlier debates, and the archives are mostly
>> useless as a knowledge base.
>>
>> == revision not specified ==
>>
>> The TOS says that reusers have to attribute the authors by linking to
>> the article. The problem is that such a link will actually point to a
>> different article after each edit (that is, the text and author list
>> will have been changed). If you find a text copied from Wikipedia on
>> the net, and there is no date information, it is very hard to find  
>> out
>> which version of the article it is (and thus who the authors are); if
>> the text is a derivative work from a Wikipedia article, then it's
>> practically impossible.
>>
>> Even if one argues that attributing bogus authors is not a problem as
>> long as the real ones all appear on the list, the author list can
>> change arbitrarily when the article is renamed or deleted and
>> rewritten. (Neither of which is apparent even if one looks at the  
>> page
>> history.)
>>
>> A few possible solutions to that:
>> - require reusers to permalink to the revision they used; change the
>> totally unhelpful error message that is shown when one follows a link
>> to a deleted version. (Probably not a very good idea as it messes up
>> caching. Also, bad usability: most of the people who click such a  
>> link
>> don't care about authors and original version one bit, and just want
>> to see/edit the current version of the article.)
>> - develop some syntax that shows the current version of the article,
>> but with a little message on top saying "you have followed a link  
>> from
>> a page reusing an older version of this article. You can see the most
>> recent version of the article; if you want to see the original click
>> here." (Maybe through some fragment id trick and javascript so it can
>> go through the cache?) We would still have to address links to  
>> deleted
>> versions.
>> - require reusers to give date/revision of the page along with the
>> url. Make some sort of search interface to find the text and/or  
>> author
>> set of an article based on that information.
>>
>> == CC version incompatibilities ==
>>
>> Copyright policy now says "You may import any text from other sources
>> that is available under the CC-BY-SA license", which is incorrect for
>> to reasons. First, CC-BY-SA-1.0 (used, for example, by Wikitravel) is
>> not compatible with anything but itself (as they forgot to include  
>> the
>> ("or any later version" part). Second, different versions and
>> jurisdictions of CC are not quite compatible: for example if a wiki
>> has an article under CC-BY-SA-3.0-US, then uploading that to  
>> Wikipedia
>> (which will use CC-BY-SA-3.0 unported) is actually a breach of the
>> license. You could change the version or jurisdiction when you create
>> an adaptation (that is, you make changes significant enough to be
>> considered on of the authors), but not when you just redistribute the
>> work. (I doubt anything could be done about this beyond prodding CC  
>> to
>> release a saner version of their license soon.)
>>
>> == edit summary cannot contain links ==
>>
>> The currently proposed editing policy says:
>>
>> "If you import text under the CC-BY-SA license, you must abide by the
>> terms of the license; specifically, you must, in a reasonable  
>> fashion,
>> credit the author(s). Where such credit is commonly given through  
>> page
>> histories (such as wiki-to-wiki copying), it is sufficient to give
>> attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page
>> history, when importing the content."
>>
>> (which BTW should be rephrased more clearly - does it mean you can  
>> use
>> the edit summary if you import text from another wiki, but not when
>> you do it from any other web page?)
>> The problem is that the edit summary does not allow external links:
>> they will show as plain text, and it would be hard to argue that that
>> is reasonable to the medium. (This one is easy to fix: allow them,  
>> and
>> rely on rev_delete and capctha to stop edit summary spam instead.)
>> Furthermore, a long link does not necessarily fit into the summary
>> (which is 255 bytes long, and there are a number of web pages that  
>> use
>> ugly links with loads GET parameters that are longer than that), so
>> some sort of separate attribution log might be more reasonable.
>>
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