[Foundation-l] Problems with the new license TOS

[Brian]

The only way to conclude that the archives are a worthless knowledge base
would be to attempt several search queries over them and find no relevant
results. Since results would have been found had reasonable searches been
attempted we know that the complaint is likely to be fake.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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