[Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at creativecommons.org> wrote:
>>> p.s. Personally, discussions of "offline" here and everywhere (say,
>>> accessibility of educational materials) are absurdly myopic.
>>> Consideration of offline use is about as relevant now as consideration
>>> of horse stables in urban planning 100 years ago.
>>>
>>
>> One would argue that putting in horse stables 100 years ago was a smart
>> move, as people use horses. You can't know that someone's going to up
>> and invent the car.
>>
>
> Furthermore, horse populations continued to grow well into the 20th
> century.  Horses peaked in the US in the 1910s, and in Finland in the
> 1950s, and horse-drawn equipment was the core transportation
> technology of World War I and played a key role even in World War II.
>
> This is a typical pattern when a complex technology is introduced in
> the presence of a simpler one; it's not a simple matter of
> replacement, and old technologies (where the infrastructure is easy to
> maintain) can stick around and even become more significant, even
> while a complex technology spreads as well.  (See David Edgerton, The
> Shock of the Old.)
>
> I'm speculating here, but it would not surprise me at all if amount of
> print publishing is still growing, and could continue to do so for a
> few more decades at least.

And Kenyans would care about US and European copyright laws? :))) And
we would care why they didn't attribute us? In such cases, those who
care from both sides are maybe ignorants, maybe idealists, but they
are definitely stupid.

I am seeing more and more old people who are using Gmail, Facebook,
Wikipedia every day around me, as well as I am seeing, from time to
time, young people who are still afraid of computers. Kim Jong Il is
afraid of traveling by airplane, so he traveled by car 1/3 of the
world to come to Moscow (a couple of months ago).

Should we treat such persons systematically or it is better to add
some exceptional rules? Something like to give a mandate to WMF to
solve problems of types like giving a formal permission to the
government of Central African Republic (or to some NGO which operates
there) to print Wikipedia editions in English and Swahili without any
attribution (even they don't need it). Or for spoken editions for
education of blind persons?

The main story here is about well defined judicial systems. And in
such systems weaker generic solutions have much bigger potential for
generic abuse. I may imagine tons of sites with copyright notice:
"This article had been made by OurGreatNetCompany and <link to the
article history>Wikipedia authors</link>." Even 1000 of Wikipedia
authors made more significant contribution than TheirGreatNetCompany.