[Foundation-l] "Terms of use" : Anglo-saxon copyright law and Anglo-saxon lawyers : a disgrace for Continental Europeans

Tue Dec 13 19:46:50 UTC 2011

On 12/13/11 9:02 AM, geni wrote:
> Actually it is extremely unclear why we switched. There are in fact a 
> number of re-users that managed to deal with the attribution issue in 
> paper form.

It can often be done on paper (and easily on the web), but it's not very 
convenient for audio, i.e. spoken wikipedia articles. In the days of the 
GFDL you not only had to recite the entire list of contributors, but 
also the full text of the GFDL! Our primary goal should be to spread 
knowledge, not to ensure that we are prominently credited as 
individuals. Proper attribution is important, but it shouldn't be a 
higher priority than making our content easy to reuse and disseminate in 
a wide variety of mediums. Using a URL allows attribution without 
creating a hardship for the reuser. This has the added benefit of 
allowing us to enforce our terms firmly and consistantly, rather than 
carving out exceptions for various cases and having inconsistencies 
between what we require on paper and what we actually expect from reusers.

Ryan Kaldari