Re: public domain
Sean Kellogg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Okay, well, now that the debate has entered into some strange parallel demension where facts no bare no relevance, I shall return to my lurker status on this list. Hope my comments were helpful to someone. I think both yourself and Andrew Suffield are exaggerating your positions. There may be real concerns there and the Lessig blog http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002449.shtml disappointed me when I first read it because it misses several points and appears to have obvious errors. For example, moral rights are called moral rights in English law - not author's rights. Anyway, I don't think it's relevant to Andrew's concerns and I don't understand why you cited it. Then again, I don't think it's easy to understand, as I don't feel that Andrew has explained his concerns clearly, even for someone who has a passing familiarity with English law. I'm also not sure whether English law applies to the person wanting to place material into the public domain. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Subscribed to this list. No need to Cc, thanks. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Linux and GPLv2
On Wednesday 30 March 2005 03:53, Raul Miller wrote: Those .h files were held to be not protected by copyright because no viable alternatives were available to interface with the system. It's hard to see how this reasoning would apply in a context where there is some viable alternative available to interface with the system. I don't know the details of the case at hand, but I remember the discussion around errno.h from the TSG fallout: The basic reasoning there was, that if one wants to implement a C stdlib an a unix-like system, a optimal errno.h would always look similar to that from ancient BSD (which most modern errno.h derive from). Since there is no way to be unixish/compatible without defining the various E* to these values, having a errno.h file with the same values is not infringing. This, I believe, can be extended to all forms of compatability: If a header file with certain contents is needed to use the interface of a library, it is no copyright infringement. To be on the safe side, this has to be interpreted very strict: Non-trivial comments and inline functions are probably not covered. Regards, David -- - hallo... wie gehts heute? - *hust* gut *rotz* *keuch* - gott sei dank kommunizieren wir über ein septisches medium ;) -- Matthias Leeb, Uni f. angewandte Kunst, 2005-02-15
Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 3)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No, but if it's included in the licence by a licensor who considers it part of the licence, clearly your we all know is false. Then this licensor is using a different license which is not a CC license. It's not that hard. -- ciao, Marco -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 3)
Marco d'Itri [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No, but if it's included in the licence by a licensor who considers it part of the licence, clearly your we all know is false. Then this licensor is using a different license which is not a CC license. It's not that hard. Then we should still ask CC to make reasonable adjustments to stop encouraging them, or to actually enforce the trademark and stop people describing these licences as CC-by (or whatever) instead of leaving it to us to mop up. It's not that hard to see that these CC-based licences are a PITA. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 3)
quote who=MJ Ray date=2005-03-29 19:07:01 + If the licensor includes that term in the copyright conditions for the work, I don't think that CC's opinion matters much, unless they are granting an unrestricted royalty-free trademark permission. After all, the copyright licensor could include something really daft like you must not use the word 'the' as an extra condition should they wish. So, if we treat this as a freedom issue in situations where the licensor has created a new version that does not include the comment/bounding box and/or where we have reason to believe the licensor feels that this is in fact part of the license, but do not treat this as a freeodm issue when documents are licensed in the normal way with a hyperlink to this page, would it be alright with you? I apologize if I misunderstood. Of course, in any situation, we should lobby to have this changed. I'm just trying to divide the must-have freedom issues from the it can and should be changed issues. Regards, Mako -- Benjamin Mako Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mako.yukidoke.org/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bittorrent licensing, take 2 [MPL and Jabber inside]
I wrote to the BitTorrent authors about the new license for version 4, and finally received an answer from them. There were 2 issues with this license: 1/ The choice of venue clause; the authors would probably agree to remove it, only keeping the choice of law, which is DFSG-free. 2/ The keep source online clause; for those who haven't read the earlier discussion, here is what it looks like: The Source Code for any version of Licensed Product or Modifications that you distribute must remain available for at least twelve (12) months after the date it initially became available, or at least six (6) months after a subsequent version of said Licensed Product or Modifications has been made available. You are responsible for ensuring that the Source Code version remains available even if the Electronic Distribution Mechanism is maintained by a third party. Their line of reasoning is that it such a clause is present in several other licenses: the APSL, RPSL, MPL and Jabber licenses. The APSL and RPSL are non-free, so that's not a problem. IIRC, the MPL was said to be problematic because of the clauses talking about patents, not about that one. However, the Jabber license is considered DFSG-free. Unless I'm missing something, we are not respecting these licenses when distributing Mozilla and Jabber in the unstable tree, where the source files aren't kept for 6 months as they should. I don't recall seeing this discussion before, and it strikes me, as, DFSG-free or not, we are violating these people's copyrights. Is there a way to deal with such an issue? -- .''`. Josselin Mouette/\./\ : :' : [EMAIL PROTECTED] `. `'[EMAIL PROTECTED] `- Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom signature.asc Description: Ceci est une partie de message =?ISO-8859-1?Q?num=E9riquement?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?_sign=E9e?=
Re: Bittorrent licensing, take 2 [MPL and Jabber inside]
On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 10:05:01PM +0200, Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Their line of reasoning is that it such a clause is present in several other licenses: the APSL, RPSL, MPL and Jabber licenses. The APSL and RPSL are non-free, so that's not a problem. IIRC, the MPL was said to be problematic because of the clauses talking about patents, not about that one. However, the Jabber license is considered DFSG-free. Unless I'm missing something, we are not respecting these licenses when distributing Mozilla and Jabber in the unstable tree, where the source files aren't kept for 6 months as they should. I don't recall seeing this discussion before, and it strikes me, as, DFSG-free or not, we are violating these people's copyrights. Is there a way to deal with such an issue? I don't know for jabber, but mozilla is tri-licensed MPL/GPL/LGPL... We don't need to fulfil the MPL. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 3)
Benj. Mako Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, if we treat this as a freedom issue in situations where the licensor has created a new version that does not include the comment/bounding box and/or where we have reason to believe the licensor feels that this is in fact part of the license, but do not treat this as a freeodm issue when documents are licensed in the normal way with a hyperlink to this page, would it be alright with you? I apologize if I misunderstood. It's clearly not a freedom issue when the licensor includes the licence on their pages without the trademark terms. I'm not sure about the situation when they just link to the ambiguous page which has had clarifications issued in obscure places by CC (along with statements relying on the US view of fair use IIRC). I reject your attempt to make me decide without extra data. In another view: I'd not complain to the licensor nor object to stuff going in debian if that was the only problem, but it's not and I'm not going to endorse WCAG-busting practice. Of course, in any situation, we should lobby to have this changed. I'm just trying to divide the must-have freedom issues from the it can and should be changed issues. So what's the practical difference? For example, would you give this matter time at a scheduled meeting with CC people? If you're really wondering about the priorities for fixing, I'd say: author name purge, anti-DRM, comparable credit, trademark licence presentation. However, I suspect the fixes in easiest-first order are: presentation, purge, credit, anti-DRM. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Bittorrent licensing, take 2 [MPL and Jabber inside]
Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wrote to the BitTorrent authors about the new license for version 4, Thank you for doing that work. [...] Their line of reasoning is that it such a clause is present in several other licenses: the APSL, RPSL, MPL and Jabber licenses. The APSL and RPSL are non-free, so that's not a problem. IIRC, the MPL was said to be problematic because of the clauses talking about patents, not about that one. However, the Jabber license is considered DFSG-free. Can you give a reference for the discussion, please? The Jabber licence preamble appears to contradict the licence text and I'm not sure if they're significant. I didn't find matches for legal in the time around the Sep 2001 package licence change. jabber.org claims that the jabberd (which I think is what debian has) is under the GPL. Most of the orig.tar.gz files I checked offered JOSL and GPLv2+ as alternatives. Maybe the debian/copyright file is just out-of-date? Unless I'm missing something, we are not respecting these licenses when distributing Mozilla and Jabber in the unstable tree, where the source files aren't kept for 6 months as they should. I don't recall seeing this discussion before, and it strikes me, as, DFSG-free or not, we are violating these people's copyrights. Is there a way to deal with such an issue? Yes. We apologise and stop distributing things under licences with which the archive network can't comply, even if it's not a DFSG problem. I can't think of another way, apart from redesigning the mirror software. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Bittorrent licensing, take 2 [MPL and Jabber inside]
Le mercredi 30 mars 2005 à 22:42 +, MJ Ray a écrit : Can you give a reference for the discussion, please? The Jabber licence preamble appears to contradict the licence text and I'm not sure if they're significant. I didn't find matches for legal in the time around the Sep 2001 package licence change. Indeed, but I couldn't find any references telling the JOSL is non-free. It seems it was uploaded without checking the license... jabber.org claims that the jabberd (which I think is what debian has) is under the GPL. Most of the orig.tar.gz files I checked offered JOSL and GPLv2+ as alternatives. Maybe the debian/copyright file is just out-of-date? That means distributing jabber isn't a problem, fixing the copyright file should be enough. Unless I'm missing something, we are not respecting these licenses when distributing Mozilla and Jabber in the unstable tree, where the source files aren't kept for 6 months as they should. I don't recall seeing this discussion before, and it strikes me, as, DFSG-free or not, we are violating these people's copyrights. Is there a way to deal with such an issue? Yes. We apologise and stop distributing things under licences with which the archive network can't comply, even if it's not a DFSG problem. That means stopping to distribute mozilla? That's a great pain. It seems that mozilla's relicensing effort is advancing ; maybe we are at a time where we can drop the un-relicensed files. The firefox and thunderbird case is more problematic, as they are released only under the MPL. I can't think of another way, apart from redesigning the mirror software. Just when we are considering to drop some architectures to spare some mirror space? -- .''`. Josselin Mouette/\./\ : :' : [EMAIL PROTECTED] `. `'[EMAIL PROTECTED] `- Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom
Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 3)
Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The point -at least for me- is to figure out if others agree. Some of the main opinion against this point are that dfsg are directed to software and cc are not. I'm not familiar with Italian, but at least in some other languages, this opinion has been motivated by confusing the words software and program. I can accept that CC are not directed towards programs, although they may cover them just like any other literary work, but I find it hard to believe that CC is not directed towards software, as it seems to be used to cover software more than anything else. So, if a software license must be free, a multimedia (I use this term to understand us, it could be not the correct one) license has to be open content. Please let's avoid the term open content here. (I think open source is meaningless and want to avoid inflicting that pain on other fields. http://mjr.towers.org.uk/writing/ambigopen.html Learn from programmers' errors.) The difference lies in the rights granted in relation to the nature and to the function of the information protected. [...] Maybe. The Fields of Endeavour DFSG is usually taken as not allowing the licensor to restrict the function, as I understand it. So, if you want to limit function, it's hard to follow DFSG. I think that one of the most important aspects of free/dfsg/opencontent/... is to create freedom. Freedom for authors and for users. And a very important freedom is that they (both) can decide which license to use. If they are not free in doing that, because if they release their images with BY-SA, these images can't stay in debian main distribution, than something is wrong. [...] At this time, no CC-licensed work follows DFSG, in my opinion. I think I agree with you: it looks like it should be possible. I hope that you can encourage CC to work with willing developers. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
