[Foundation-l] Authoring on wikijunior : providing private information.

Tue Oct 4 13:57:45 UTC 2005

Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

> As far as I understood this is not mandatory information but only 
> recommended stuff.
>
> One fact is that identification of the author and of his year of death 
> is very important for copyright law since his work will fall into 
> public domain 70 years after he died.
>
> But there is nothing mandatory in these informations !
>
> Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Legal
> CERSA-CNRS PARIS 2

Is there any reason why we should not collect this information as 
voluntary information fields on the user configuration page?  Are there 
any realisitc legal roadblocks or some other reason why this information 
should not be there associated with the contributions to each change 
with the Wikimedia projects?

This seems as though I'm asking for identification numbers like Social 
Security numbers, bank account information, or other related 
information.  I am not.  What I am asking for is that if you want to 
claim copyright on your contribution, you need to give this minimum 
amount of information for legal protection and to give a realistic 
copyright claim on your contributions.  As it stands right now, there is 
no way that you can realisticly claim copyright on any of your 
contributions right now, and certainly there is no way that you can 
resolve potential copyright claims on material if it goes to court in a 
dispute.

I really don't see what the big deal about this is anyway.  If you want 
to be an anonymous contributor... even with a "registered user" account, 
that is still possible.  That will not be taken away, but at the same 
time you can't be anonymous and maintain control of copyright.  Those 
are mutually exclusive issues.  And all content for Wikimedia projects 
is copyrighted... just with generous redistrubtion licenses available to 
anybody who is interested.

I guess it will take a formal legal disupte to force the issue here, but 
by then it will be too late.  I would be willing to be an "expert 
witness" for a plaintiff willing to invalidate copyright claims for 
anybody who has currently done contributions toward Wikimedia Foundation 
projects right now.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning