[Foundation-l] Re-licensing

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

By way of top-posting a brief preamble, let me apologize
if someone thinks it tacky to reply to a week old posting,
but I personally needed to reflect a bit before my precise
position has clarified on some issues, which I do want
to address.

Erik Moeller wrote:


> Flexible and vague clauses can work well when you're dealing with
> issues with few stakeholders who all have a shared and tacit
> understanding of what they want to accomplish. By definition, massive
> collaboration isn't such a situation: any one of hundreds or thousands
> of contributors to a document can behave unreasonably, interpreting
> rules to the detriment of others. The distributed ownership of
> copyright to a single work is an example of what Michael Heller calls
> 'gridlock' or an 'anticommons'. Ironically, even with free content
> licenses, the gridlock effects of copyright can still come into play.
>
>   
I think the problem I have with this is the view that wikipedia
is merely a massive collaboration. It certainly is that too, but
we certainly have not shied away from also importing works
from already published sources, while their licensing has
been compatible. If it is your intention to indicate a radical
shift that would forever prevent this practice, and require
that all content be composed on-site, it would be useful if
you came right out and said so, so we could all address this
issue head on.

But there is a real problem of saying that those who have
created such material under a compatible license, have
also implicitly agreed with site terms of use.
> I believe it's our obligation to give our reusers protection from
> being hassled by people insisting on heavy attribution requirements,
> and to create consistency in reuse guidelines. Really, WMF and its
> chapters can hardly develop partnerships with content reusers if we
> can't give clarity on what's required of them. A great deal of free
> information reuse may not be happening because of fear, uncertainty
> and doubt. I would much rather remove all doubt that our content is
> free to be reused without onerous restrictions.
>
>   

Well, I think it would be really bad if WMF and its chapters
willfully mislead their partners on what was legally required
to allow reuse in the maximum of jurisdictions that are
compatible with the base licensing, never mind what site
terms of use say.

It is a simple inescapable fact that international laws on
Intellectual Property are complex, and it is because of
this that the Creative Commons accommodate multiple
jurisdictions interoperability as far as possible. If it
were the case that WMF in the interest of claiming to
"clarify" issues, when they in fact will cloud the real
complexity by expressing a false simplicity, where none
obtains; well, in my personal opinion, that would not be
all that useful.

Terms of use can require things beyond the licensing,
I suppose, such as waiving rights, in jurisdictions
where that can be done (I believe in Canada you can
waive moral rights for instance), or contractually agree
to not pursue some rights, even though they theoretically
are still yours, but that still leaves jurisdictions where
moral rights are inalienable, and the conundrum of
content not created under site terms of use, but
merely imported under a license which would be
compatible with the license our content would be
under, but not under any reasonable understanding
of the terms of use further requirements to rescind
some rights that are not impinged upon by the
license itself.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen