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

Wed Dec 14 18:32:18 UTC 2011

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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.
>

That's basically what the Terms of Use say:
"Attribution is an important part of these licenses. We consider it giving
credit where credit is due – to authors like yourself. When you contribute
text, you agree to be attributed in any of the following fashions: ...
Through a list of all authors (but please note that any list of authors may
be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions)."
Are you suggesting that it should be changed to say "Through a list of the *
major* authors"? That might not be a bad idea, although I'm not sure it's
permitted by the existing CC license.

And just to clear up a common misconception, the Foundation has never asked
for attribution to the Foundation.

It does sound like the copyright laws of Finland are more modern than what
we have in the States. However, there are two problems with using the
ported CC licenses. First, they introduce license incompatibilities. They
are often just 1-way compatible with the unported licenses, and sometimes
incompatible with other ported licenses, although there is disagreement as
to the details. The other problem is that Creative Commons has had a hard
time keeping the ported licenses maintained and up to date. This is why
most of the ported licenses are still at version 2.0. From the Creative
Commons FAQ:
"Porting is a demanding process that requires a lot of resources and time
by both CC and the porting team"
"Please note that as of 2011 CC no longer approves new license porting
projects"

For those two reasons, I personally think it makes more sense to stick with
the unported CC-BY-SA license for now. The idea of having a ported Terms of
Use, however, might be more doable, but I'd like to hear the legal team's
opinion on this as they probably have a much better idea of what that would
entail (and if there would really be tangible benefits from this).

Ryan Kaldari