I guess this clears it up. Life is too short, I'll continue using the definition I was given years ago.
Brightness SEE:
http://www.crompton.com/wa3dsp/light/lumin.html A photometer and a pilot's eyes are receiving light from the same point on a display' s screen ( SEE cover photo). Measuring the luminance of the light from that point is straightforward and highly repeatable We can go a step further and take a second measurement at a different point on the screen. We can then calculate the contrast between the two points. The pilot's perception of brightness, however, is complicated by human visual phenomena such as time-dependent light and dark adaptation, simultaneous contrast, lateral inhibition (Mach effect), dazzle (contrast overload), and color. The pilot's perception of display contrast is intimately related to his perception of brightness .
The concept that is now known as "luminance " was for many years designated by the term "brightness. "
This led to much confusion between the objective concept of "brightness" as intensity per unit of projected area, and' the subjective concept of "brightness" which referred to a sensation in the consciousness of a human observer. The newer term "luminance" was adopted to avoid this confusion. - from Optics by Francis Weston Sears (Addison-Wesley, 1949)
Is there enough of a difference between luminance and brightness to justify the distinction? Has there ever been a case where a display had an incorrect specification, didn't perform properly, or cost too much because somebody said "brightness" when he or she should have said "luminance"? Many professionals in the display community say that they say "brightness" because many people don't know what "luminance" is. But to believe that the words brightness and luminance are essentially interchangeable ignores the clear distinction in the definitions of these two words, and the differing realities behind the words. If the luminance of a viewed light source is increased 10 times, viewers do not judge that the brightness has increased 10 times. The relationship is, in fact, logarithmic: the sensitivity of the eye decreases rapidly as the luminance of the source increases. It is this characteristic that allows the human eye to operate over such an extremely wide range of light levels ( SEE Fig. 4).
Also see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White%27s_illusion
White's illusion is an optical illusion illustrating the fact that the same target luminance can elicit different perceptions of brightness in different contexts.Brightness (also called effulgence) is an attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to emit a given amount of light. In other words, brightness is the perception elicited by the luminance of a visual target. This is a subjective attribute/property of an object being observed.
As the Chinese proverb says: The first step towards genius is calling things by their proper name.