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

[Ryan Kaldari]

Sorry about the confusion. I was talking most recently about the GFDL, 
which does not mention moral rights. CC-BY-SA does mention moral rights 
(to state that it does not affect them). Interestingly, the U.S. port of 
the CC-BY-SA license does not include a disclaimer about moral rights, 
but this is irrelevant since the WMF uses the unported license, not the 
U.S. version. The unported license is designed to be legally useful in 
as many countries as possible, and during the 4.0 draft process they are 
hoping to improve this aspect of the license. From everything I've 
heard, Creative Commons is hoping to move away from ported licenses, as 
these have been a major headache for everyone, especially in regards to 
license compatibility. The idea to have numerous localized Terms of Use 
for Wikipedia (based on the laws of each country) is an interesting 
idea. It would probably be a nightmare to maintain, but we've managed 
worse. I would love to hear Geoff's thoughts on this.

Getting back to your original point, I suppose it's true that the Terms 
of Service could affect the protection of moral rights (in certain 
countries), even if the license explicitly doesn't. However, after doing 
more research into this, it looks like it's a moot issue. Moral rights 
(per Common law) are for the protection of literary and artistic works, 
not factual reference works. Works like encyclopedias, dictionaries, 
newspaper articles, etc. are not covered by moral rights. I imagine the 
reasoning behind this is that such works entail a minimum degree of 
creative "authorship" and are often published without attribution. If 
I'm mistaken in this conclusion, please let me know.

Ryan Kaldari

On 12/13/11 7:56 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Ryan Kaldari<rkaldari at wikimedia.org>  wrote:
>> On 12/13/11 12:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>>> Using an URL does allow the semblance of attribution, but does not
>>> fulfil the legal requirements of moral rights. I find it mildly
>>> distasteful, that
>>> other jurisdictions laws are referred to as "exceptions for various cases",
>>> when CC itself has committed itself to better internationalisation in its
>>> 4.0 version.
>> Actually, I was suggesting the opposite: that in many cases (in the GFDL
>> days) we carved out exceptions (unofficially) to allow people to reuse
>> our content without meeting the full requirements of the license (much
>> less the moral rights requirements).
> If it is unofficial, it sounds a bit grandiose to term the action as "carving
> out". English language usage would be to use the phrase "turn a blind eye".
>
> And "if" as you previously claimed, the moral rights requirements are implicit
> in the full licence requirements, why would you argue that stating them
> in the TOS is redundant, but now seem to imply that the moral rights are
> more stringent than the licence. Either moral rights are contained in the
> licence, or not. I really hope 4.0 brings clarity, and also that WMF will go
> forward from an unported licence to a fully internationalized TOS
> implementation, the sooner the better.
>
>