[FM Discuss] updated IBD

[Daniel James]

Hi Adam,

> Even naming names is not sustainable I believe.

In the UK at least, authors generally hold book copyrights, not
publishers (unlike the music industry practice of retaining copyright in
a sound recording and/or the composition).

So naming names is vitally important to protect open books being forked
into closed versions (otherwise how can you alert the copyright holders
and free-license-granters that their book is being distributed non-free?)

> The basic conclusion I got to is that attribution is transient.

Not if you're Agatha Christie, she's still in print :-)

> It should be captured for a time with a profile connected to the
> artifact (book) and then maintained somewhere in a database but
> doesnt have to be keep being brought up or repeated or carried with
> the object...

That would run counter to the GPL, where the copyright notice is vital.
A separate notice would almost certainly be lost.

> the new contributors should tell their story, but dont need to feel
> they must duplicate 14 pages of credits...or more...

The answer to that might be to put the copyright notice in a condensed,
machine-readable form, rather than not print it.

Also there's the issue of fairness. Does the person who wrote most of
the book get to have their name first? Academic publishers deal with
minor contributors using 'authors et al', can we use something similar?

If I take your book, and make some bad edits, then publish it under my
name, would that be fair? Worse case scenario: someone makes bad edits,
claims authorship, then attributes the original ideas to you, thereby
associating you with both the bad edit and whatever crazy ideas they
added. (It happened to me with two entirely separate magazine articles).

Cheers!

Daniel