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

Wed Dec 14 17:03:57 UTC 2011

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I've actually been doing a lot of research on the history of copyright law
> on-wiki - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ironholds/statute for
> example - and I've been focusing on the Berne Convention, later on. The
> rationale for encyclopaedias (something that is not just common law, but in
> some nations, statutory) is essentially that; encyclopedias contain
> thousands of tiny, two-line long articles, and attribution is a bitch.

I don't claim to have made a special study of the issue, but have had it
pretty much forced down my throat by circumstances. While our laws here
in Finland are much worse than Iceland for instance -- and still lightyears
better than current (much less projected) US legislation -- we have a nice
clause in our laws that allow for "shared" attribution, when the work is a
massively collaborative work, like wikipedia. The law still does not allow
for the site to use TOS to circumvent moral rights, but it is very nicely
fine-grained in allowing things that would be useful for wikipedia, but
that is currently not available to us, because there persists this view that
we are "unported" and merely acknowledge the right of countries to not
adhere to the onerous and WMF-centric attribution praxis. It would be
very useful for the foundation to admit, that absolutely nobody needs to
attribute WMF if they just mention a few chief authors of the content.

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]