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

Tue Dec 13 21:37:47 UTC 2011

On 12/13/11 12:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Using an URL does allow the semblance of attribution, but does not
> fulfil the legal requirements of moral rights. I find it mildly
> distasteful, that
> other jurisdictions laws are referred to as "exceptions for various cases",
> when CC itself has committed itself to better internationalisation in its
> 4.0 version.

Actually, I was suggesting the opposite: that in many cases (in the GFDL 
days) we carved out exceptions (unofficially) to allow people to reuse 
our content without meeting the full requirements of the license (much 
less the moral rights requirements).

If you've ever taken a look at...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GFDL_Compliance
and its associated talk page, you'll see that the en.wiki community at 
least treated license compliance as a fairly gray issue, i.e. there was 
some degree of allowance for "trying to comply" rather than actually 
complying, due to the fact that few reusers were willing to list all the 
contributors (even on websites, where space is cheap).

I have no idea if the same was true for the position of the Foundation's 
legal department, but I suspect it was. (I'm just guessing though.)

It looks like the main areas where URL attribution would be an issue are 
Commonwealth countries. In the rest of the world, moral rights are 
either non-existent, or not waivable. Is there any Commonwealth caselaw 
on what types of attribution are acceptable for satisfying moral rights?

Ryan Kaldari