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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: jonathon <jonathon.blake AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Development of Creative Commons licenses" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Requirements for ...: toward a practicable definition of "author name" ?
  • Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:35:02 +0000

Benjamin wrote:

> * Should credit work's authors with the "names" he received attached to
> the work (be them real names or pseudonyms).

Yes. I'd actually go one step further: Failure to include an author
name in the file metadata invalidates the CC license.

> * You should not have to contact authors to ask them how they would like
> to be credited:

As a general rule of thumb, I agree with this. The exceptions would
be individuals such as that Japanese politician that newspapers
consistently use the wrong Kanji or. (Though I would expect him to use
the correct Kanji in his material.)

> * If an author decide to change his name ... you should not be expected to
> find this out and fix your copy to reflect all those changes aftermath.

+1
In meat space, authors use two or more names to differentiate their material.

> * You should be allowed to transliterate an author name to an other writing
> system if technically necessary.

I'd suggest that if the transliterated form be included, then the
original must also be included. Take "孔夫子" for instance. The
transliteration is:
* pinyin: Kǒng Fūzǐ;
* Wade-Giles: K'ung-fu-tzu;
* ?: Confucius;

> * There are indeed many other considerations that matter for
> accreditation, like "how many authors need to be credited" (ie. for a
> massively collaborative work), but I think that's an other matter,
> unrelated to the "author name" definition.

I think it does belong here.
A Wikipedia article, for example, has multiple authors.
** Some of those "authors' do nothing but revert "vandalism".
Neither the "vandal", nor the "reverter" contributed any content to
the article. (There are several articles where the "author" with the
most "contributions", is the bot that reverts vandalism.)
** Some contributors make one change, but that change is several
hundred kilobytes in size, and remains the basis of the article for
the rest of its "life".
* Contributors with the highest number of edits have that status
because they do one of the following:
** Grammar checking;
** Spell checking;
** article reverts;
** Add {{fact}} tags indiscriminately;

None of those add content, and attributing the contributor would be
akin to crediting the copy editor in a hard copy book as the author of
the book.

> ie. for Wikipedia, that would mean the names as they appear in the
> article's history (or a subset of those names).

For Wikipedia, my suggestion would be "Corporate authorship:
Wikipedia Foundation".

> How many authors names should be required to be credited,

It depends upon the type of work. For wikis, my suggestion is that
corporate authorship should suffice. For wikis that only have one or
two contributors, then, maybe, an individual contributors name can be
used. (Offhand, the only example I can think of is the Huna
Foundation's wiki, but I don't know if that was started prior to
Lani's death.)

> if a work has many of them (ie. "the 5 principal authors" (but then,
> "principal" need to be defined), or "all authors") ?

When Wikipedia was first started, a bot went wild, creating new
articles that were nothing more than electronic transcriptions of the
1909 Encyclopedia Britannica. Does one credit the bot that added
them, Encyclopedia Britannica, or the actual contributor to the
Encyclopedia Britannica article?

xan

jonathon



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