Re: W3C Excerpt and Citation license
In message 87ocwfmql4@mocca.josefsson.org, Simon Josefsson si...@josefsson.org writes Ted Guild t...@w3.org writes: W3C is creating an excerpt license (current draft online [1]) and hoping to get public review and feedback, including particularly from the Open Source community. The complete license is reproduced below, for easy review on debian-legal. One problematic part seem to be (my emphasis): Permission to copy, to use, to create derivatives of parts of the work (but not the entire work), or to create extended citations or ^ excerpts, without fee or royalty is hereby granted provided that the licensee: I think this fails DFSG#3 which requires that you can create derivative works. Further, this part: The target content must not create a derivative specification. It appears to fail DFSG#6 which requires that the license do not discriminate against some fields of endeavor. This should be easily fixed. It's obviously intended to address passing off, which is a trademark issue. And it's actually very similar (if not identical) in intent to the licencing of the GPL, which forbids creating a derivative that implies it is a GPL. I'd be chary of saying it violates #6, unless you wish to define ripping off the users as a valid field of endeavour. /Simon Cheers, Wol [Draft] W3C® Excerpt Citation License Status: This document was announced publicly on 4 March 2009. Please send any comments to site-pol...@w3.org by 18 March 2009. Public documents on the W3C website that are provided under the W3C Document License can also be used under this W3C Excerpt License. By using and/or copying this document, or any W3C document that either links to the then current document license or to this license, you (the licensee) agree that you have read, understood, and will comply with the terms and conditions that follow. For further information, please see the Explanatory Note on the W3C® Excerpt Citation License. The permissions below are granted for documents in any medium that refer to this license or to the W3C Document Licence and that have been created for the purpose of software documentation, defined to be: any material intended to help users understand software features or functionalities that implement parts of a W3C specification. This includes but is not limited to material provided in Help systems. Permissions Permission to copy, to use, to create derivatives of parts of the work (but not the entire work), or to create extended citations or excerpts, without fee or royalty is hereby granted provided that the licensee: Attribution * include links or URLs to the original W3C documents used on at least one prominent place of the software documentation * include this text at the same location: This documentation has been created using excerpts from one or more referenced W3C Documents. More information can be found on the original W3C Documents. The use of citations or excerpts according to the W3C excerpt and citation license does not create an endorsement by W3C in any way. Legal notices and licenses from W3C are available at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice. No derivative specifications The target content must not create a derivative specification. Specifically, it must not: * resemble visually the original specification; * use the W3C logo; * copy or mimic any 'Status of this Document' section. * copy or mimic the head of the document until the copyright section Disclaimer Include the following disclaimer: W3C DOCUMENTS ARE PROVIDED AS IS, AND NEITHER COPYRIGHT HOLDERS NOR W3C MAKE REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR TITLE; THAT THE CONTENTS OF THE DOCUMENT ARE SUITABLE FOR ANY PURPOSE; NOR THAT THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SUCH CONTENTS WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY PATENTS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS OR OTHER RIGHTS. NEITHER W3C NOR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS OF THE INITIAL DOCUMENTS WILL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF ANY USE OF THE DOCUMENT CITED OR USED OR THE PERFORMANCE OR IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CONTENTS THEREOF. Other Rights No further right to create modifications or derivatives of W3C documents is granted pursuant to this license subject to the following exceptions: * If additional requirements (documented in the Copyright FAQ) are satisfied, the right to create modifications or derivatives is sometimes granted by the W3C to individuals complying with those requirements. The name and trademarks of NEITHER W3C NOR of the copyright holders may be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to this document or its contents without specific, written prior permission. Title to copyright in this document and in the documents that
Re: W3C Excerpt and Citation license
Simon Josefsson si...@josefsson.org wrote: Ted Guild t...@w3.org writes: W3C is creating an excerpt license (current draft online [1]) and hoping to get public review and feedback, including particularly from the Open Source community. The complete license is reproduced below, for easy review on debian-legal. One problematic part seem to be (my emphasis): Permission to copy, to use, to create derivatives of parts of the work (but not the entire work), or to create extended citations or ^ excerpts, without fee or royalty is hereby granted provided that the licensee: I think this fails DFSG#3 which requires that you can create derivative works. In practice, this may not be too difficult to work around. You can just omit something non-essential like the table of contents or formatting. It is needlessly annoying, though. Further, this part: The target content must not create a derivative specification. It appears to fail DFSG#6 which requires that the license do not discriminate against some fields of endeavor. Agreed. This is more serious. People are not allowed to build upon an existing spec to improve and extend it, such as going from rfc 822 to 2822. As long as w3c wants to only allow itself to make new and competing specifications, there is going to be a problem. Cheers, Walter Landry wlan...@caltech.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
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Re: W3C Excerpt and Citation license
Thank you both for the comments, adding Ian and Rigo who I should have had copied initially. Copy of the thread starts at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/thread.html#msg20 Walter Landry wlan...@caltech.edu writes: Simon Josefsson si...@josefsson.org wrote: One problematic part seem to be (my emphasis): Permission to copy, to use, to create derivatives of parts of the work (but not the entire work), or to create extended citations or ^ excerpts, without fee or royalty is hereby granted provided that the licensee: I think this fails DFSG#3 which requires that you can create derivative works. In practice, this may not be too difficult to work around. You can just omit something non-essential like the table of contents or formatting. It is needlessly annoying, though. Further, this part: The target content must not create a derivative specification. It appears to fail DFSG#6 which requires that the license do not discriminate against some fields of endeavor. Agreed. This is more serious. People are not allowed to build upon an existing spec to improve and extend it, such as going from rfc 822 to 2822. As long as w3c wants to only allow itself to make new and competing specifications, there is going to be a problem. Yes and no, for the nuances I defer more to Ian and Rigo who can probably clarify better than I. It is very common for one Spec to have elements it draws on from specifications developed elsewhere as one will see in references section [5]. XHTML and other markups (defined at W3C and elsewhere) certainly extend XML, draw on IETF, POSIX and other W3C standards. [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/html/#refs -- Ted Guild t...@w3.org W3C Systems Team http://www.w3.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: W3C Excerpt and Citation license
Ted Guild t...@w3.org wrote: [...] For instance, a concern [3] in the case of Open Standards is that derivative works might threaten interoperability. [...] I feel that the best way to preserve the integrity of your works is to require unapproved derivative works to carry a different name (not a particular name, just a different one). The best way for people to verify the integrity of copies of your works is for you to sign them with a public key tool like GnuPG. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/IPR-FAQ-2620 seems to assume that copyright is the only tool which can be used for the integrity of specifications and doesn't seem to mention trademarks or digital signatures in the context of W3C Documents. As far as documents are concerned, that seems mostly a copyright FAQ. Copyright seems a poor tool for this to me... it's like there's this copyright hammer and it's being used to tighten up the integrity screws, resulting in minor-but-significant damage to the public wall. Using copyright to refuse users the freedom to adapt the work to their needs, or to limit derived works and discriminate against fields of endeavour, will mean that your Standards may be Open, but they wouldn't be includable in Free and Open Source Software. The licence which has been emailed to this list seems to limit derived works and discriminate against fields of endeavour. This may be an improvement, but it still doesn't seem usable in FOSS projects, as far as I can tell. Could you change the copyright licence to be less restrictive in the ways outlined above and make W3C documents includable in FOSS, so we can share them more freely, please? I am a debian developer and a member of various cooperatives but this is expressing only my personal view at this time. Hope that helps, -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: W3C Excerpt and Citation license
On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:40:07 +0100 Simon Josefsson wrote: [...] The complete license is reproduced below, for easy review on debian-legal. Thank you, Simon. My comments follow. Disclaimers, as usual: IANAL, TINLA, IANADD, TINASOTODP. [...] [Draft] W3C® Excerpt Citation License [...] The permissions below are granted for documents in any medium that refer to this license or to the W3C Document Licence If I understand correctly, this clause is intended to grant additional permissions to documents that are already licensed under the terms of the W3C Document License [1]. I am not sure I understand why this level of indirectness is necessary. I would rather amend the W3C Document Licence [1], so that every document that refers to the generic license URL [1] gets automatically upgraded to a new, more permissive, license. Of course, a document referring to a specific license URL [2], won't be upgraded (but will such a document get additional permissions with the current indirect W3C Excerpt Citation License?). [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-documents [2] such as, for instance: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231 [...] Permissions Permission to copy, to use, to create derivatives of parts of the work (but not the entire work), As already explained by Simon Josefsson, this forbids creating derivatives of the entire work, thus failing to meet DFSG#3. It's also not hard to work around, as explained by Walter Landry, hence it's probably pointless. I suggest to drop this restriction entirely and grant permission to create derivatives of the entire work and of any part thereof. or to create extended citations or excerpts, without fee or royalty is hereby granted provided that the licensee: I think that the placement of without fee or royalty is slightly ambiguous, as it could misinterpreted to mean that, e.g., copying is only permitted if it is done without asking for a fee. Since I am not an English native speaker, I am not really sure about this potential ambiguity. Anyway, I am under the impression that something like: Permission to ... is hereby granted without fee or royalty, provided that ... would make it clearer that it is the licensor who is not asking any fee or royalty in exchange for the granted permissions. Attribution * include links or URLs to the original W3C documents used on at least one prominent place of the software documentation * include this text at the same location: This documentation has been created using excerpts from one or more referenced W3C Documents. More information can be found on the original W3C Documents. The use of citations or excerpts according to the W3C excerpt and citation license does not create an endorsement by W3C in any way. Legal notices and licenses from W3C are available at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice. I think that mandating a fixed specific text to be included in derivative works is not a good idea, because it creates an unmodifiable part of the derivative work, thus causing derivative works to fail DFSG#3. I suggest that the clause should require that a derivative work includes a prominent notice explaining that it is based on one or more referenced W3C Documents and that no endorsement by W3C should be assumed unless explicitly noted. This would serve the same purpose, without mandating a specific fixed phrasing. No derivative specifications The target content must not create a derivative specification. As already said by Simon Josefsson, this restriction is troublesome. In my opinion, the reason why it is problematic is that it forbids a category of derivative works to be created, thus failing to meet DFSG#3. Anthony W. Youngman and MJ Ray have already explained that there are better ways of preserving integrity, without forbidding the creation of derivative specifications. I hope the above may be of some help. -- On some search engines, searching for my nickname AND nano-documents may lead you to my website... . Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4 pgpYeE8pbfGIZ.pgp Description: PGP signature
