[Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

[geni]

2009/3/15 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> Would this mean the vicious lunatic arsehole contributor (note I don't
> say "hypothetical" there, there are quite enough real-world examples
> of unbalanced nutters out to nail us on anything) who takes the
> mug-maker to court would win, or lose? To what extent? If the link was
> correct at the time, they could point to having followed the Wikimedia
> FAQ on the subject and completely demonstrate a good-faith attempt to
> keep to the license per wording and guidelines?

Wikimedia is not a party to the license therefor it's FAQ is of no
relevance. The answer again goes to the license text. "You must...keep
intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide ,reasonable to
the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original
Author".
The mug maker could lose the case on the grounds that the license made
it clear that it is the person who is doing the reuse who has to
provide the credit and attempting to do it via third parties is not
legitimate.

> This is what "law is squishy" means. It's not sane or reasonable to
> require that the Foundation's guidelines specify only actions that
> would be mathematically provably robust in all possible circumstances
> for an indefinite time into the future; in civil litigation, as any
> such suit would be, one does in fact get a lot of points for doing the
> reasonable thing to the best of one's abilities.
>

However any guidelines the foundation uses must be as robust as
possible otherwise rather than being a significant part of the free
content movement wikipedia ends up as the copyright equivalent of a
radioactive mess no sane person would touch.

-- 
geni