Last modified: 2005-07-30 11:40:55 UTC
There is a critical need for each MediaWiki user to have several pieces of information when preparing formal copyright registration. Quite litterally MediaWiki software is making it illegal for us to do formal copyright registration of the contents for all MediaWiki projects except for private and corporate wikis where the contents are clearly owned by a corporation (and not the Wikimedia Foundation). To finish this whole mess, we may have to get some debates going on Foundation-l and Meta in terms of how it affects the Foundation itself, and to socially request people to add this information. Once this information has been gathered, there will have to be some policies established on what to do with it, and how it should be released. For now, include a "checkbox" that allows this information to be "published" on the user information page. It should not be checked by default. If it is not checked, the information can only be displayed to admins/bureaucrats/sysops/stewards. At what level this information can be displayed if the user wants to stay anonymous is a policy decision outside the scope of this bug report and should be modifable in terms of MediaWiki software. All of this can and should be optional for each user to fill out as they feel necessary, and only needs to be put into the user information records. The most logical place to enter this information would be in the "User Settings" page, preferably on the "User Data" sub-section. Specific items that should be settable for each user would include: ==Required for Copyright== Full Legal Name: This needs to be fairly long for some users, and I'm not exactly sure how many characters to allow here. More than one culture can have dozens or even a hundred names, although socially they often use only 2-3 names for contract purposes. That may be all that is really needed here anyway. Country of Origin (Nationality): This is absolutely required if formal copyright status is to be issued. This is also required under the Bern Convention of copyrights and other copyright treaties. As far as implementation, all that really needs to be kept is the ISO country code for the nationality. To make it "clean", a simple drop-down box is all that is necessary with a simple list of countries. An explaination that this is the country they may have a passport from, or that they claim to be a citizen of. Please include an option of "none" for nationality, and "other". For explaination, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_person Current Residence (Country): Again all this has to be is just an ISO country code, and is the country that you are currently residing in. This is not necessarily the same as the country of orgin or the nationality, but simply where are they at right now. == Optional for copyright registration, but asked for == The following pieces of information are asked for by the U.S. Copyright Office (so should be included in this bug report) but are considered optional and not legally required to complete copyright registration: Year of Birth: A simple 4-digit year is all that is necesssary to keep track of here, with a comment that it should be in the "common era" (not using Islamic, Jewish, or other alternative dating system... I hope we don't get too many users or language sub-projects that insist on these alternative dates, but it may happen). Year of Death: Yes, this is morbid, but absolutely necessary as most current copyright laws have sunset provisions of 50 to 100 years after the death of the author. I would assume that this would have to be set by an admin (if an author sets his own death date you can assume it would be more than likely a vandal). How to get an admin to set this piece of information is out of my hands and may require some creativity. Address (snail mail) of author: Basically how you can be contacted by the government once registration has been completed. P.O. boxes are acceptable, so any way that you can get a first-class letter sent to you is reasonable here. It should be a multi-line input box. If you try to get fancy here and have separate areas for city/state/zip codes you are going to get yelled at when it doesn't fit the postal format for another country, so don't even try. == Addtional information generated elsewhere == There is some additional information that can likely be generated elsewhere, but may be subject to a future bug report. By being generated elsewhere, that means it can be determined socially from talk pages, inter-user communications, or by means that don't specifically require MediaWiki software. Nature of the contribution: The copyright office asks what the author actually did to warrent citation as a copyright claimant for a literary work. Usually in the case of Wikimedia projects it will be "co-author", however some users simply correct typos and do only minor adjustments to text, which may qualify them as "editors". I don't even know how to deal with obvious vandals and if they should even be counted as a co-author or a copyright claimant... likely not. Again, this is beyond the scope of the bug report. Work for hire: It seems unlikely that any Wikimedia project is going to be a work for hire according to the U.S. Copyright Office requirments, but it may be possible. For those few individuals who are hired by the Wikimedia Foundation to write text, it may be pretty easy to keep track of them separately. As for other MediaWiki users and installations, it is going to be in context for its usage and how it may be used in a particular installation. Quite likely the admins of the Wiki are going to know through social means rather than something that needs to be kept track of. Anonymous contributions: This is already dealt with in MediaWiki software quite nicely, so it is already covered. Psuedonym contributions: The problem right now (and the purpose of this bug report) is because **ALL** contributions are currently Psuedonyms, with no way to give proper citation of authors unless they explictly use their legal name as the Psuedonym. This can give some legal heartburn to all involved.
Please discuss about it with the Wikipedia community. If the community need those features (additional fields), we will add them in the software.
