[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Robert Rohde]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it is useful to note that even in countries where
> moral rights are inalienable, there is a requirement of
> "originality" and "creative effort".
<snip>

It is not strictly true that all countries require "creativity", some
jurisdictions (notably the UK) tend to use copyright to protect the
expenditure of effort involved regardless of whether the work is
creative.  In other words, the rights follow from the fact that
someone expended time and effort in creating the publication, and do
not necessarily require that the publication contains an original
creative expression.

This is known as the "sweat of the brow" doctrine [1] and has been
explicitly rejected in US case law.


That said, I'm not sure how much effort one would have to expend in
making cleanup and formatting edits to a wiki article before it could
be considered enough to count.  However, I do think we should give
some consideration to the wikignomes that beautify and cleanup
articles, even if they aren't writing lots of text.  Their work,
though sometimes formulaic, does improve the overall quality and
consistency of the resulting product.

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow