[Foundation-l] Problems with the new license TOS

[Brian]

http://www.google.com/search?q=foundation-l+summary

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 12:44 AM, Bence Damokos <bdamokos at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> Could we please summarize the outcome of the long discussions on this
> subject instead of discussing different external search services to the
> mailing list? (No doubt one can learn a lot about the different external
> possibilities not offered via the list.wikimedia.org site, yet I would
> like
> to learn at least as much about the answers to the actual issues posed in
> the original post [even at the price of repeating previously stated
> conclusions])
>
> These questions have apparently been discussed before and I am confident
> that they will come up again: it might be a good idea to collect the
> answers
> that came out of long, fast-paced and hard to follow mailing list threads.
> The FAQ and the oppositional arguments pages (cited in this thread) in my
> opinion don't serve the purpose and audience of the questions of this
> thread
> (the FAQ in my opinion is aimed at a less initiated audience, while the
> oppositional arguments deal with outright refusing this change; these
> questions on the other hand might stir the fantasy of those that are
> "advanced" licencwise and want to make this migration work and thus have
> questions that will inevitably come up in practice once the licence update
> has been followed through).
>
> Thank you,
> Bence Damokos
>
> 2009/4/14 Tisza Gergő <gtisza at gmail.com>
>
> > 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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> >
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