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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 2:00 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.

(Disclaimer: I haven't looked at this, it's probably absolutely
hideous for all kinds of technical reasons)

Eh, backspace isn't much of a difficulty.   It could probably also be
made to only trigger for text over some particular size. You're not
likely to have a legal obligation for a couple of words, but if you
copy several paragraphs you'll have both a legal and an ethical
obligation to provide some form of attribution.

I could see more practical issues with it complicating moving text
around in articles.

The applicable principle of usability is that the default behaviour
should be what is the usually the right behaviour and you should be
able to override it when it isn't.  Attribute on copy fits that
principle.


A while back I put in a JS kludge on commons that made right clicking
on thumbnails remind you once and only once (via a cookie) that you
can save a higher resolution version from the image page.  Erik
eventually removed it based on the completely reasonable complaint
that it left the same kind of bad taste as sites that totally disable
image saving.  So, how does this solution avoid 'feeling' like sites
that do obnoxious things?  I notice that my browser spins busy
whenever I highlight. Is that okay?