On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 12:48:59 -0400, Alex R. <alex756(a)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