[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Anthony]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> > But I am sure there are no applicable moral rights
> > to let's say correcting missing space around punctuation.
> I have made some studies, and it appears this last
> sentence is in fact complete bollocks. (xcuse my french)
>
> There is a frequently expressed view that the moral
> rights provision of "paternity rights" are there to
> protect the authors right to be identified as the
> originator of the work, but it is in fact (according to
> a finding by Finnish copyrights protection arbitration
> committee - which of course has no actual legal standing
> as a binding precedent on later court cases) somewhat
> more involved.
>
> TN 1991:7 states that the paternity right extends to
> the level of making it obligatory to not only mention
> if the original authors work has been tampered in some
> way (adapted, translated, modified, whatever; choose
> your own term) but to identify specifically by whom, if
> known.
>
> This is a very strong finding, though as far as I know
> untested in an actual court of law here.
>
> I am sure most cases of shuffling punctuation around
> and such is not something that can be considered
> creative acts, but certainly they would qualify as
> modifications. And I was recently reminded of the
> Emily Dickinson poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"
> (published as "The Snake" in The Republican) had
> a change of a single punctuation mark, which in her
> own view changed the meaning of it completely on its
> head; so even a mechanical application of considering
> punctuation changes as minor, is not universally
> defensible.


I hope you don't mind my abbreviation of your original context.  Anyone who
didn't read the original post can scroll back a few messages to see it.

Anyway, it seems to me that the purported moral right you're speaking of
would be a right of the original author, and not a right of the person
making the modification.  Am I correct in this assumption?

If so, I think it has significance in the how that right should be
protected, if indeed one is to accept that it is a right.  In that sense,
I'm not sure how "modified by a bunch of idiots on Wikipedia" is any worse
than "modified by [insert a bunch of psudonyms here]".

On the other hand, the GFDL (via the section entitled History) certainly
protects this purported right much stronger than CC-BY-SA under any
interpretation.  CC-BY-SA mostly attempts to punt on these issues, leaving
it to the laws of the individual states (and in some cases to the terms of
service of the individual ISPs where the content is first contributed).

Personally I think there ought to be a philosophical discussion of whether
or not this is a right the WMF wishes to recognize, and if so, to what
extent.  Only by answering that question can this issue be rationally
resolved, and once that question is answered the specifics should come quite
naturally.  But there seems to be a reluctance to engage in such discussion
on this mailing list.

So, might as well just flip a coin.