[Wikimedia-l] Licencing question

[Brad Jorsch]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 11:51 AM, Richard Symonds
<richard.symonds at wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
>
> The CC family of licences [...] however, say that
> you need to have attribution using a byline next to the image, in the
> fashion 'Horation Nelson/CC-BY-SA'.

Err, where?

Looking at the text of the CC-BY-SA-3.0, it looks to me like it says
to "provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing"
various information, but doesn't specify exactly how this is to be
presented. It even explicitly says "The credit required by this
Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner". Is linking
to an image description page with all this information reasonable to
the medium of an online encyclopedia using the MediaWiki software?

It also says you must "keep intact all copyright notices for the
Work", but it doesn't seem to specify what exactly "keep intact"
means. If you take a CC-licensed mp3 with a copyright notice in the
id3 tag and use it as part of the soundtrack for your feature film,
you can't exactly keep the id3 tag but you could transfer it to the
credits. Does that keep it intact? If you crop a copyright notice
watermark off of an image but transcribe the text of the notice to the
image's metadata (or MediaWiki file description page), does that keep
it intact?

The "armchair lawyers" on Wikipedia and Commons typically answer these
questions as "yes". If you really want to know the answers to all
these questions, ask a real lawyer and/or take it to court for an
actual ruling.

>     - Has this discussion been had before, if so, where?

It has come up on enwiki's Village pump several times. Probably on
Commons's equivalent as well.