[Foundation-l] CC attribution with cut'n'pasted text - Tynt's Tracer Tool

[Brian]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/7/24 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> > In that case they can highlight the attribution and press backspace!
>
> Sure, but we shouldn't make it unnecessarily difficult for people to
> reuse our content and tidying up after our crude attempt to force
> attribution would qualify as unnecessarily difficult.
>

I believe the alternate usability interpretation is more persuasive. That by
law they are required to provide attribution and yet many users are totally
unaware a) that they are required to provide attribution b) that a "free"
encyclopedia cares about attribution in the first place and c) of the
specifics of providing attribution. If we consider the burdens that I have
just outlined as compared with the burden of highlighting and deleting some
text its clear that automatically solving the 90% case for users is the
correct thing to do.