On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 2:14 PM, Lori Bowen Ayre <[email protected]> wrote: > If the source material is licensed, then isn't it more a matter of courtesy > than licensing to give them credit?
Not if the license explicitly asks for attribution, which is the case here. > I think giving credit where credit is due but it also doesn't seem > reasonable to spend a bunch of DIG time finding the source of material that > was never licensed in any way. Of course determining it was NOT licensed is > an effort in and of itself. To be clear, if material isn't licensed and isn't in the public domain (U.S. point of view here), then copyright says we're not allowed to use it to make derivative copies the way we've been doing. It's the license that eases some of the restrictions which copyright gives by default. For example, there's a document on the wiki titled "Basic Reporting Guide - PINES Edition". There's no copyright statement, but there doesn't need to be, whoever wrote it still has copyright in it. There's no explicit license, and therefore we can't copy from it without contacting the copyright holders and asking for license to do so. At best there may be an implied license for use by virtue of being shared on the wiki, but certainly nothing about redistribution, or worse, re-licensing the material. The wiki now has language that implies that folks contributing material to it are agreeing to license that material under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, but that can't retroactively apply to everything already there. So we may be in some trouble from a legal standpoint, if we've lifted any of that material. However, it's fine to "learn" from any source, regardless of the license, and then write new material based on what you've learned. -- Jason Etheridge | VP, Tactical Development | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) | email: [email protected] | web: http://www.esilibrary.com _______________________________________________ OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION mailing list [email protected] http://list.georgialibraries.org/mailman/listinfo/open-ils-documentation
