[Wikipedia-l] since we are on legal matters ...

[Toby Bartels]

Anthere wrote in part:

>Since we are on legal matters,

Since we are on legal matters, I'm also posting to <wikilegal-l>.

>Mav claims I am illegally removing the credit for text
>I did not write myself.

>I answered that I mentionned in the comment box that I
>was not the original author, hence not doing anything
>illegal and definitly not stealing anyone else job.

>Mav answers : Wrong. Read the author credit areas of
>the GNU Free Documentation License.

>So my question is : if none of us has the right to
>attribute to himself the credit of something written
>by someone else, what happen to all the major amount
>of text that is regularly clipped from one article,
>and moved to another page by someone who is not the
>original author of the text ? How does the licence
>handle that ? If the moved text contains legal issues,
>who is said liable, the lost original author, or the
>one who took the responsability of the move and who is
>consequently the owner of the edit?

>And is commenting in the comment box that we are not
>the original author of the edit not enough to insure
>legal rights of authorship are respected ? What are we
>supposed to do when moving someone else work ? Is
>commenting enough ? Or not ? Should we leave a message
>in the talk page ?

I always figured that one should comment in the edit comment box
"(taken from [[old page title]])"; although this doesn't list authors,
nevertheless it tells people where (on the same site) to look them up.
Then we claim, for legal purposes, that this is the "accepted practice"
for citing authors in Wikimedia projects: to refer to an old page title
where people can go to look up edit history and discover the authors.

>* or we admit that we are together building an
>encyclopedia, that ownership is secondary in our
>building process, and that what is important is the
>content, not the author. I would very much prefer that
>option :-)

But how to build that into the legal technicalities?
The problem is that we really don't have any options there.
We chose the GNU FDL a long time ago and are now at its mercy.
Whether it's good or bad, it's viral, and we're stuck with it.
(Which reminds me, has RMS shown any further interest in a Lesser FDL
and in allowing FDL works to be relicensed under a Lesser FDL?
This was to facilitate integration with other free copyleft licences,
like Creative Commons BY-SA, if nobody remembers.)


-- Toby