On Sun, 29 Feb 2004, Eli Billauer wrote: > OK, let's realize one simple thing. > > If someone wants to take something from these lectures, they will. If > they want to give credits, they will. If they don't want to, they wont.
And if they don't have a license, they will be breaking the law. > Licenses, especially when it comes to slides, are such nonsense. The > Bulgarian case is a beautiful demonstration: > > Here come a few guys from Bulgaria, who want to translate our slides. In > a friendly (should I dare to use the word "free"?) world, we would > simply say: "Of course, go ahead, we're glad we could help you", but > instead we say something like "we're going to call our lawyer". The only > reason we don't call him, is that we don't have one. If YOU wrote the slides, and the slides are your own work, the "go ahead" response is reasonable. But suppose now you're hosting someone else's work. You have no authority to tell them to use the slides. Furthermore, if you do tell them to use the slides, and the original author (or the company he works for) gets mad, they can sue YOU for allowing someone else to use something you didn't write. > Eventually, they will accept our conditions, or they won't. If they > accepted our conditions, it's most probably because they were OK with > them in the first place. And that's exactly why we want the licenses to say that explictly, so that the one lecture written on company time and based on sources which do not want to be widely redistributed will not lead to people suing Haifux. The licensing should have been done in the first place before publishing the slides. But, as there is no license, we must ask for one explictly now. > And there is the third possibility: That they get sick and tired of > licenses, and write it all by themselves. Which happens all too often. Licensing can be as trivial as saying "do anything you want with my lectures". I don't see the problem. > Unlike software, slides consist of little text, and a few figures, and > neither have to be "tested". If I just want to make a lecture in the > Estonian Linux Club, based upon Shahar's slides, and not waste too much > time, I will simply use his slides, and hence the credits will be there. > If I work for a corporate, I will rewrite the slides, possibly copying > the figures with another graphics tools. Can you prove I copied from you > after that? And as far as I know, it even copyrightly legal (which is > not the point here anyhow). Using Shachar's slides in an Estonian Linux Club may well be illegal under copyright law, as you are not allowed to make copies without explicit permission from the author. > I hate licenses, because they take a community that should deal with > helping and sharing, and feeds it with loads of paranoia. We're > protecting ourselves against an enemy that is either nonexistent, or > strong enough to do whatever he wants. In a perfect world, there would be no copyright law (or a much more lenient one) that will make everything free unless explictly restiricted. In that world, we wouldn't have to bother with licenses to make our stuff free. Regratably, this is not the case, and the default is "all rights reserved". Alon -- This message was sent by Alon Altman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ICQ:1366540 GPG public key at http://alon.wox.org/pubkey.txt Key fingerprint = A670 6C81 19D3 3773 3627 DE14 B44A 50A3 FE06 7F24 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -=[ Random Fortune ]=- Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly. -- Elbert Hubbard -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://www.haifux.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
