[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Sam Johnston wrote:
> Given that full attributions are both largely worthless and onerous to
> the point of forbidding reuse in many circumstances (e.g. paragraph
> quotes, most physical mediums, compilations, etc.) and partial
> attributions are in many ways worse than no attributions at all,
> surely attributing Wikipedia is the best way to achieve our primary
> goals?
>   

Full attributions are often the only guarantee of clear
ability to reuse. That is a fact. It would be arduous to
clarify where it might not be. I am satisfied the lawyers
at CC would have taken any avenue to give the "BY"
part of the license more explicit boundaries; if
jurisdictional universal interoperability requirements
were easily swung that way. That they did
not so find, should be a powerful signal to WMF, which
after all has not really taken all that much trouble to
research the matter. (There have been forceful assertions
to the contrary, but they haven't yet demonstrated
to have discovered persuasive arguments to any effect.)

If the primary objective is to set Wikipedia at odds with a
large segment of the world and its own contributors;
saying "Attribute all our content to Wikipedia, or else!"
... "and let the devil take the hindmost editors." is a
nice way to accomplish that, of course.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen