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Re: Advice on multiple authorship/wiki

From: Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>
To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: Advice on multiple authorship/wiki
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 14:33:21 -0400

On Fri, 2004-29-10 at 21:33 +1300, Jim Cheetham wrote:

I'm setting up a wiki that will encourage unregistered people to 
contribute, and I'd like to ensure that the results are CC licensed. As 
far as I can tell, the CC licenses are worded to assume "a single 
author". The group that will "sponsor" the wiki has no legal entity.

What's the received wisdom on how to approach this (not uncommon) situation?

There is no consensus. You may be interested in ideas about authorship for wikis:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/AuthorshipModel

I personally prefer the temporal authorship model of wikis as the clearest and most reasonable. For copyright purposes, each page is a Work, and each edit to the page is the creation of a Derivative Work based on the previous version. The wiki owner/operator exercises the license rights to distribute a Collective Work that includes each individual Work.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan AT bad.dynu.ca                OOO

Advice on multiple authorship/wiki, Jim Cheetham, 10/29/2004
- Re: Advice on multiple authorship/wiki, Evan Prodromou, 10/29/2004