[Foundation-l] status of the licensing update

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

geni wrote:
> 2009/2/19 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>:
>   
>> 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
>>     
>
>
> That can't be done with any content added to wikipedia prior to the
> license update makeing such waive useless if not actively damaging.
>   

For the record, I fully agree, as I think could be inferred
from the paragraph you truncated from my comment.
Naturally those would only apply to only new content and
only to new content published for the first time on the
WMF site, which really should set alarm bells ringing for
anyone that there is something really silly at work there.

Just because I think such silly "terms of use" could  be
phrased, I don't remotely think they would be a good
idea as a matter of ethics, nor as a matter of law. What
would really be onerous would be for WMF to require
people to negotiate the issue of whether content was
merely as per the CC license, or whether additional
"terms of use" came into play, if they reused the content.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen