[Foundation-l] status of the licensing update

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/2/18 Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net>:
>   
>> We do still plan to have a survey, although I don't think it's critical
>> that it precede the vote. The point of the survey is in particular to
>> get some more information that would help work out details for
>> attribution standards. Not everything is specified in the licenses, for
>> good reason, and we should continue fine-tuning attribution after
>> whatever decision we make, no need to close off the discussion. To a
>> large part attribution is independent of the relicensing question, it's
>> just that this is a good time to also foster discussion on the issue.
>>     
>
> I will oppose any proposal that doesn't specify attribution standards,
> and I doubt I'm alone in that - they are a matter of how we are
> interpreting the license. You can't vote on whether to adopt a license
> without knowing what that license means.
>
>   

Without disagreeing on the importance of attribution standards
per se, it is clearly inaccurate to say that they signify how we
interpret the license. Contributors can be asked to waive
rights to content they add to the site (where they are the
sole originators of the material, and not merely importing
content that has already been published elsewhere) even
above and beyond the terms of the specific license, and equally
they can be asked to not pursue some rights specified in the
license, where such contractual stipulations are legal. Not that
it is clear how enforceable such stipulations or waivers
would be, if reusers asserted a different understanding
of the license and/or the IP laws of their specific jurisdiction.

Those "terms of use" would IMO be largely theoretical and
not legally binding in many jurisdictions, and furthermore
they would complicate things greatly, instead of (their
claimed effect) simplifying things for reusers. Personally
I think trying to shoehorn a gloss on what CC-BY-SA has
intentionally left ambiguous, would be a mistake. The
really simple thing would be to just leave the license as
written, and concentrate perhaps in helping to develop
the wording of the license itself, rather than forcing the
issue in a site-based form for WMF only.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen