[Foundation-l] Licensing transition: opposing points of view

[Erik Moeller]

2009/3/20 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> Your suggestion that wikipedia:copyrights has any baring on what
> people have agreed to have done with their work simply doesn't hold
> water.

Well, I'm glad that we've cleared up that CC-BY-SA and link-back
credit aren't irreconcilable after all. Now we're apparently moving on
to the new topic: Do site-wide terms of use matter when determining
what a license means in practice? I'm not going to spend a lot of time
on this argument: Of course a site-wide policy page linked to from
every page has relevance when determining the terms of use/re-use. But
even a literal and unreasonably narrow focus on the GFDL doesn't
support rigorous author attribution:

1) Authors contributed acknowledging that they are licensing their
edits under the GFDL;
2) The GFDL has an "at least five principal authors" requirement to
give credit on the page title;
3) Wikipedia does not give credit on the page title;
4) The act of repeatedly contributing to Wikipedia under the GFDL can
be argued to constitute the release from attribution which the GFDL
allows for.

The change tracking history section has nothing to do with
attribution, as I've noted before. That's evident because the GFDL
explicitly places reasonable limitations on the extent of author
credit, to prevent the kinds of excessive bylines that we've been
talking about. It's also evident because a GFDL document can be
created without a page history while still giving author credit. In
the context of a wiki, change histories were clearly not designed for
purposes of author credit, as they are an incredibly annoying tool
when you actually want to use them for this purpose.

I'm not making this argument: I am saying that we have established,
through historical practice, policy and debate, that crediting
re-users via link or URL is a minimally acceptable baseline. What is
and isn't acceptable is defined through more than the license. But the
experience of contributing under a literal reading of the license
alone doesn't support a claim to require stronger author attribution
than what we're proposing, or even any author attribution at all.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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