[Foundation-l] (no subject)

Wed Oct 14 09:53:17 UTC 2009

2009/10/13 Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com>:

> These people are not Wikipedia editors.  Is it appropriate and/or
> legal under the terms of the GFDL or the CC-by-SA for a
> freely-licensed work to be "claimed" with a preposition such as "by",
> which by any interpretation of the English language in this usage,
> would connote authorship?  Personally, I don't think it is appropriate
> (thus that nauseous feeling I mentioned earlier).  But, I'm not a
> highly-paid lawyer, so maybe I just don't know better.  I've been in
> situations before where I know I am ethically correct, but helpless in
> the light of the law.

I think, from past experience, this may be a failing of Amazon (etc)
and not necessarily the result of any malfesance on the part of the
publishers, annoying little sods though they are.

The title page - I haven't seen one, I confess - probably has
something like "edited by Smith, Jones, etc." under the title. Here,
they're just stating the defensible (if, as we've discussed, somewhat
misleading) claim of editorship. In cataloguing parlance, this is the
"statement of responsibility" - the verbose description of who's
responsible and what they did. When you properly catalogue a book, you
would make two entries; one is the statement of responsibility, and
one is simply a list of named individuals in that statement.

a) edited by Susan Smith, with foreword by Charles Clark.

b) Smith, Susan / Clark, Charles

Bookseller data tends to be of the form of (b) - a list of entries in
a field - and not verbose like (a), though it's common to have them
expanded with notes like (editor) (translator) etc.

So, Amazon would take b), and turn it into:

"by Susan Smith (editor), Charles Clark (foreword)"

simply by tidying the list up and putting "by" at the front to make it
human-readable They're the ones interpolating the "by" here; the
original data probably never had it.

[It's actually worse on the main search, incidentally - there, it's
just "by X", and the (editor) note is dropped entirely]

This is, annoyingly, one of those things that it would probably be
relatively easy for Amazon to fix - code the system up so that "by X,
Y, Z" becomes "edited by X, Y, Z" when all of X, Y and Z are noted as
editors. Beats me where you file a bug report with them, though...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk