Wiki submission license, credits, and policy.

[Jamie Jones]

On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 19:08 +0000, Matthew East wrote:
> First is that it's not necessary for the documents to have a record of
> the authors on them at all. Licences deal with the way in which the
> material subject to the licence (a wiki page in this case, or the whole
> body of the documentation) can be reproduced, whether copied in its
> entirety or modified. They do not generally impose any obligations on us
> as authors and primary publishers of the work, whether to provide
> details of authors or anything else.
> 
> There would only be a need for us to supply authors on the documents if
> the licences stated that they did not apply AT ALL if the document did
> not have author attribution on it. Neither of them say this.
> 
I must read Section 4 c of
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode differently to
you.

Section 4c
If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works,
You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide,
reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the
Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied,

I believe the author credits are an assertion of copyright, and should
be kept intact (if of course they are in the original document).

> Second, even if I'm wrong and the wiki somehow does not constitute an
> original document, in any case it is only necessary to give attribution
> which is "reasonable to the medium or means" used - in this case it is a
> wiki, which implies by its very nature that every page is editable by
> all and is the work of the wider community.
> 
> Third, if this is wrong, I still think the presence of the page history
> would suggest that reasonable attribution is given. 
> 
> Fourth, again even if all the above are wrong, the nature of the wiki is
> such that contributors can be taken to have waived any obligation on
> people to attribute the work done.

How does this apply to documents that were copied into the wiki from a
non-wiki source ? As is the case with my documentation.

> 
> Having said all of this I do think that there are one or two
> improvements that we can make. First is to make it clearer what licences
> actually apply on the wiki, perhaps by incorporating a link to the
> licence on main pages such as FrontPage and UserDocumentation. Secondly,
> I think we can also make it clearer that we are happy to waive the
> requirement that authors are specifically attributed in any reproduction
> of the document, whether copied or modified. In my opinion, this isn't
> strictly necessary, for the reasons I've outlined, but it wouldn't hurt
> to make this clear.

I do think it is necessary to be specific about this. Perhaps a
copyright assignment similar to what the FSF uses might be useful, so
that eg I have copyright on my document, when it is contributed to the
wiki, I and Ubuntu both have copyright over the wiki version of the
document.

Regards,
Jamie
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