[Foundation-l] "Terms of use" : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans

[Thomas Dalton]

On 12 December 2011 20:05, Marc A. Pelletier <marc at uberbox.org> wrote:
> On 12/12/2011 3:02 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
>> I think what he means is that under most European copyright regimes,
>> an author has far-reaching personality rights, which include the right
>> to have the work accredited to them whenever it is republished. The
>> terms of use, in his feeling, hollow out this right by redefining the
>> obligatory credit part of the GFL and CC-BY-SA in such a way that one
>> can mention all authors by doing something that does not include
>> mentioning any of them.
>
> That may be the case, but any contributions to the projects is made
> under an unequivocal grants of permission to redistribute under those
> terms; the TOS only restate the inevitable, they're not putting forth
> any new concept there.

I believe in certain jurisdictions such terms are automatically null
and void. The moral rights can't be waived. I expect that is the cause
of the objection.

I'm not really sure what alternative we have, though. We switched to
the current license terms because we realised requiring re-users to
credit every single person that made a non-trivial edit to the page
was impractical and hardly any re-users were actually doing that. In
the jurisdictions in question, re-users probably have no choice, but I
guess that just means it is impractical to re-use Wikipedia legally in
those jurisdictions.