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Does Creative Commons Work With Pseudonymity?
kale77in writes "I was going to direct this question to the Australian Arts Law Centre, and probably still will, but I'm sure they're very busy and I'm sure that someone here must have bumped up against this issue already. I have not found it addressed in the CC FAQ. I have a website which is oriented around the study of Ancient Greek. Much material relevant to this study (texts, lexica, etc) was published in the 1800s; it is now out of copyright and readily available from archive.org and similar sources; but much of this material could use an upgrade and users will have up-to-date contributions of their own to make. I'm writing a system that allows user entry, correcting, searching, commentary, tagging, redistribution and so on, of such material." Read on for the questions this raises about licensing, attribution, and copyright.
Kale77in continues: "Here's my issue: I would like everything to be under Creative Commons BY-SA — I can say 'same as Wikipedia' and this will encourage participation and confidence. The question is who should own the copyright of user-created data. I'd like the copyright to be held by the submitter. But I've no interest in enforcing anything more than pseudonymity for the users. Now I understand that copyrights can be held pseudonymously; but how does this allow attribution as required by CC-BY-SA? Is it enough for an author of a derivative work to reference the page on my site where the pseudonymous copyright holder grants the license? Does the end user need to be able to contact the copyright holder for additional rights? Is this a road through a minefield, so that I should just bite the bullet and, like Wikipedia, make a foundation to hold and license the copyright for collaborative works? But that costs money to administer; for a small non-profit venture is it best to just chill and take resort in persuading the users to make everything public domain? Or does a special User Agreement allow some way to gain the benefits of CC licensing (= endless reuse, and no hassle) without losing pseudonymity? But then, won't a complex upfront agreement hinder participation?"
Last I checked, in the US at least, one could have a copyright in ones pen name, so I'm not really sure why there would be something special about using a CC license.
I'd just ask the person uploading the content to specify how they'd like to be attributed. Maybe make the default "Your Site Name Contributor" and let them change it as part of their profile.
Section 4 c i seems to be what you should be looking at.
(i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties")
Last I checked, in the US at least, one could have a copyright in ones pen name, so I'm not really sure why there would be something special about using a CC license.
For reference:
... But be aware that if a copyright is held under a fictitious name, business dealings involving the copyrighted property may raise questions about its ownership. Consult an attorney for legal advice on this matter."
"An author of a copyrighted work can use a pseudonym or pen name. A work is pseudonymous if the author is identified on copies or phonorecords of the work by a fictitious name. Nicknames and other diminutive forms of legal names are not considered fictitious. Copyright does not protect pseudonyms or other names.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl101.html
like Wikipedia, make a foundation to hold and license the copyright for collaborative works
That's actually not how Wikipedia works. The Wikimedia Foundation holds none of the copyrights, these are still retained by the (pseudonymous in most cases, I might add!) user who posted the content.
The only extra precautions they take, AFAIK, are making sure that all revisions are always and permanently attributed (e.g., you cannot delete accounts, as that would leave a situation where it is unknown who to attribute). When attributing, it is enough to say "User SoAndSo on Wikipedia".
So I think you'll be fine.
CC-BY-SA eliminates the need to contact the copyright holder, because the rights have already been granted: the right to publish derivative works, with attribution, under essentially the same license. If someone wants rights beyond that, they going to be disappointed, because people who select CC-BY-SA as the license generally mean it: those rights, but no other rights.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The Wikimedia Foundation, who operates Wikipedia, does not own copyright to the collaborative works that are its articles. It also does not "license" it. The only thing it does is to claim that whenever you edit a page on Wikipedia, that edit is under CC-BY-SA, and if you don't agree with that, don't edit.
great point about the holding of copyright. id add that the reason wikipedia doesnt hold copyright, is because if it did, then it would be getting sued all the time for defamation and libel. if they dont hold copyright, they can use the 'shield law' in the US, which makes them basically a 'service provider' and thus immune to lawsuits over the content they hold. thats my theory anyways (and i dont know much, but i have a hunch).
instead, when someone wants to sue over a wikipedia article, they sue a john doe who wrote it (or the part they object to). IIRC some famous actor did this over the article written about him.
so if you have an article written by 50 people, then 50 different people own the copyright. you have to figure out who is responsible for which bits... which involves a lot of mucking around with article history to see who made what. (although theoretically there is a tool called wikiblame)
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however there is the possibility of deleting a wikipedia account. i think it is called something like the 'right to disappear' from wikipedia. you will find accounts on there sometimes with these weird, generic names, i cant remember what it is exactly but its something like Dissappeared User 225 or something.
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CC-BY-SA eliminates the need to contact the copyright holder, because the rights have already been granted: the right to publish derivative works, with attribution, under essentially the same license.
Well, that's not completely true. If you publish something through CC-BY-SA, you grant those rights provided you had the neccesary rioghts to do so. If someone decided to put Harry Potter on the net under CC-BY-SA, you still would not get the rights to distribute it by downloading it there, unless J. K. Rowling (or the publisher, I'm not sure who actually owns the rights) approved it.
Now imagine a text added under CC-BY-SA by the author, but under pseudonym without any way to find out the actual author. Now someone else comes, claims he was the author, and he never put it there under CC-BY-SA, nor authorized anyone to do so. If the real author (or submitter) was known, it would probably be trivial to show that he couldn't reasonably have gotten a copy from that other person, because the two were completely unrelated, and there was no publication of that stuff at the time he uploaded it (and even if there was a relation, that person might be able to provide evidence that he wrote it himself; and even if not, there are now two persons claiming authorship, with the uploader in slight advantage because he's the only one known top have access to the text at that time). However if the submitter isn't known, you have no way to refute that claim.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.