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

Wed Dec 14 19:34:59 UTC 2011

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 8:32 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

You may have missed the fact I used the term "praxis", rather than "lexis".
I do want to re-iterate that what is significant is not the legal language of
the TOS, but the way it is represented to the using public.

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