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

Tue Dec 13 22:10:14 UTC 2011

Not really, in the UK at least. However this is a poor example; it's
important to note that UK moral rights legislation isn't
*actually*representative. we fail to comply with the Berne Convention
on attribution,
insofar as we don't mandate it except when the author makes clear he wants
it. It's also possible that our moral rights law doesn't actually apply to
Wikipedia, since it makes clear (see section 79(6) of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988) that there isn't a right to attribution for
works published as part of an encyclopedia. Whoops ;).

On 13 December 2011 21:37, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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-- 
Oliver Keyes
Community Liason, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation