[WikiEN-l] Controversial user nicknames

Wed Aug 27 23:54:37 UTC 2003

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 12:48:59 -0400, Alex R. <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> gave 
utterance to the following:

> Any user name is a copyright pseudonym if it is not a real user's name.
> The user name (or IP address) is the only way to trace the attribution
> rights
> (this is especially inportant in droit d'auteur countries such as Canada
> where
> an author's moral rights must be respected, and if someone has questions
> about the validity of the copyright of the underlying text submitted to
> Wikipedia the only way to check that is to contact the contributor from
> Wikipedia (they usually call that 'due diligence' in the copyright chain 
> of
> title
> review industry).
>
> The  GFDL requires that the last five authors of a document released be
> listed
> (see section 4(B) of the license).  Thus,  five contributors to a page 
> may
> technically have to be listed by any GFDL republisher of that page.
>
> Imagine someone who wants to publish a page and finds that one of the
> authors has an offensive name; they may decide that they cannot morally
> accept to use such a page because of the offensive character of the 
> author's
> name which they must acknowledge.
>

Another point that it raises is that the majority of people are still on 
dynamic IP's. (Wikipedia probably has a higher proportion of static IP's 
than most websites due to the number of contributors who are staff at 
academic institutions.
So with a not-logged in contributor on a dynamic IP, the only means of 
identifying the person is by asking the ISP who had that IP at that time. 
And most ISP's will flatly refuse to divulge that information. Under New 
Zealand's privacy laws I think the only grounds on which they are obliged 
or even allowed to release such personal information is a police 
investigation or as part of a civil lawsuit. A copyright enquiry simply 
doesn't cut it.

-- 
Richard Grevers
Between two evils always pick the one you haven't tried