[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
> <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> So at the very minimum, it would well serve us to know what the
>> established standards are within CC-BY-SA, in particular focusing
>> on the "BY" part.
>>     
>
> As others have pointed out on this or nearby threads, attribution is
> highly medium specific.  
That has been expressed as a preference for pragmatic
reasons. I don't think anyone has in fact been talking
about what the current practices are in this respect in
differing media in the Creative Commons world as things
stand, before WMF transitioning there. There may have
been very thin mentions of other parts of WMF than
wikipedia which have been Creative Commons from the
git-go.

However, if what you say happens to in fact be correct
(never mind if it has been previously covered in these
threads or not), that would be quite significant, in
particular in those jurisdictions where moral rights
are defined in law. At least one legal "out" for the absolute
"paternity right" to a work here in Finland, is the part
that the form of attribution should accord with common
methods of the field, and "good manners".

There is case-law on this. (KKO 1992:63 (Kalevala Koru))
was a decision that a jeweler did not have to include
the name of the designer with the packaging of each
individual piece of jewelery sold, as long as the designer
was credited in a more general fashion, with the sales
material etc. sent to the stores in relation to the works.

In that decision it was considered that the standard of
that particular field was that the name of the artist who
designed the jewelery was affixed to each piece of jewelery
if the artist happened to have sufficient "name recognition",
but not otherwise.

> Personally, I think the guidelines Erik has
> mooted are very much in line with what CC-BY-SA enables and the wiki
> medium, but there's no better group than this (meaning Wikimedia
> projects collectively, if not just foundation-l) to improve on these
> if needed.
>
>   
Equally personally, I think Erik's first suggestions were
borderline legally defensible, in the sense that an argument
could be framed around it, though not necessarily one
that is a slam-dunk to prevail on, nor remotely a strongly
persuasive one.

That said, my personal view on what is the "right thing"
to do about attribution is far more nuanced than a merely
legalistic one. But I won't revisit or develop it publicly at
this point.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen