Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell AT gmail.com>]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 2:39 PM, Cc <cc AT phizz.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> The issue with attribution is that "sparky-the-undertaker" is the WP
> author not some one that goes by the same name on some other site.

Who says sparkly the undertaker has ever edited Wikipedia? There are
tens of thousands of articles in Wikipedia (since you've picked that
as an example) which were copied from elsewhere under acceptable
licensing.

> not then you are stuffed and rightly so.

Not "and rightly so", there could be hundreds of contributors to a
work. Being unable to move the work to a new host because a couple of
them are unlocatable is not a desirable licensing outcome.

I'm actually unable to tell from your example which of the readings of
the behavior you've adopted.

Sparkly the undertaker writes an article on planetmath (with
cc-by-sa-3.0 style tos attribution to planetmath).

Elvis copies it into a wikipedia article, combining it with existing
work and adding to it, along with many other people. (with
Cc-By-Sa-3.0 style ToS attribution that attribution be to Wikipedia)

Nathan forks the article off and puts it in MathWiz wiki where some
more people, including many but not all of the WP editors, edit on it.
(with CC-By-Sa-3.0 style ToS requirements that attribution be to
MathWizWiki)

The wikipedia version of the article gets deleted due to some
complicated wikipedia politics.

Murdoch excerpts from MathWiz in his newspapers. What URI(s) must he
list with the work?

All of them? In which case you have a ever-growing wallet of barnacles
encrusting the work.  Actually copying the work becomes difficult in
practice because none of the steps along the way collected the
required URLs in a usable form, they're just burred in some article
history. The WP URI would be no longer functional, and would be a link
back to a party that had pissed off some portion of the authors by
virtue of deleting their work.

Just the first one (planet math)?  But what about the authors of the
other original content the the article was merged into?

Just MathWizWiki?  Then what good did that do? you could always
replace the URI by rehosting it.