[Foundation-l] Re-licensing

[geni]

2009/1/23 Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:

> E our attribution model, which is the
> result of many months of deliberation and consultation,

Evidences?

> "However, we think that the notion that print-outs of massively
> collaborative works should carry author attribution over multiple
> pages, that spoken versions should contain many seconds of
> text-to-speech generated author lists, that indeed any re-user will
> have to worry about this problem, is completely counter to the
> principles of free culture.

{{fact}}

> So, for your past edits, please click this
> button. We will always attribute you by name as long as we use your
> text, and we will probably remove your edits over time.

Questionable. For example the heavily edited [[Siege]] has text that
is recognizably mine from 2004.


> It would be, IMO, a completely defensible way to deal with a situation
> where a minority is trying to impose standards on an entire community
> which are counter to its objectives. I'm not necessarily saying that
> this reflects the situation we have today: I don't know how widespread
> the belief in the need for distribution of excessive author metadata
> is. I think it would be worth the effort to find out. It's my personal
> belief that such metadata requirements are harmful examples of
> non-free licensing terms, and I would be surprised to see many people
> defend excessive attribution as in the
> http://books.google.com/books?id=BaWKVqiUH-4C&pg=PT979#PPT959,M1
> example (even if it's aesthetically well done and obviously pleasing
> to lots of German mothers).

Err your proposed solution wouldn't greatly change the situation there
since it could require up to a quarter of a million credits and about
50,000 urls. Since most wikipedia nics are rather shorter than URLs I
find it questionable that that would count as an improvement.

Hmm it has pics as well attaching urls to the pics instead of author
nics actively makes things worse.

> The above solution would still result in the odd situation where the
> article on [[France]] would say: 'See (url) for a list of authors,
> including Foo and Bar'. But that is a problem that could be solved
> over time by removing those people's contributions. It seems to me
> that, essentially, some people have been operating under the
> assumption that they are contributing in a fashion that would make the
> resulting work effectively non-free in much the same way other onerous
> restrictions do. It's too bad that they've made that assumption, given
> how strongly and clearly we've always emphasized the principles of
> freedom.

The phrase "Reasonable to the medium or means" in the CC license
pretty much makes what you suggest impossible using credits. If you
want to do that copyright notices are a far better attack line.


> 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.

If you think CC licenses don't have large flexible and vague areas you
haven't read them or have a poor understanding of international IP
law.

> 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.

Those two directly contradict.

> Really, WMF and its
> chapters can hardly develop partnerships with content reusers if we
> can't give clarity on what's required of them.

You cannot give clarity for them whatever you do. You are not a
government. The cost however  of your attempt would be that wikipedia
is unable to be a reuser.

> A great deal of free
> information reuse may not be happening because of fear, uncertainty
> and doubt.

"may". So speculation.

> I would much rather remove all doubt that our content is
> free to be reused without onerous restrictions.

You might want to but there is no way you can actually do it. There is
very little caselaw when it comes to free licenses (heh we can't even
show that CC licenses are something that can be meaningfully agreed to
in say France).

-- 
geni