data copyright or not -- what is Debian's take?
Hi Debian Legal Experts, N.B. yes -- I use 'experts', and you do not have to be certified, nor a diplomaed attorney. Since everything is relative, you might just have an expertise I am lacking, thus being experts for my sake. Enjoy the title ;-) In the light of my veiled (never said here that it to be applied to data) question about appropriateness of custom attribution with CC BY-SA 3.0 license, and further communications on cc-community list: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2011-January/005825.html I wonder now what actually to recommend people willing to share data, so later on it could be uploaded to the Debian archives without problem (I already had 1 package rejected due to missing copyright statements for the included datasets). Should I advise to blindly attach a copyright statement and license, possibly copyrighting non-copyrightable, thus committing Copyfraud in some jurisdictions? What would be the take of Debian ftpmasters whenever they receive a package shipping data without clean copyright/license statement and something like this instead: This data has been collected 2010 by Author1, Author2. Please recognise the substantial effort that went into the collection of this data by attributing the authors. Attribute by citing the original publication: Author1, Author2, Title of the paper, where published, 2010, URL: http:// Or should I advise to use the text of MIT license, verbally and explicitly describing possible uses and disclaiming any warranty? but once again without any copyright statement. Thanks in advance for your feedback, -- =--= Keep in touch www.onerussian.com Yaroslav Halchenko www.ohloh.net/accounts/yarikoptic -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110124154434.ga30...@onerussian.com
Re: data copyright or not -- what is Debian's take?
On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 at 10:44:34 -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: Should I advise to blindly attach a copyright statement and license, possibly copyrighting non-copyrightable, thus committing Copyfraud in some jurisdictions? I'm not a lawyer or anything, but would this work? To the extent that it is covered by copyright under any applicable laws, this data is copyright © 1984 Winston Smith. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person [... and the rest of the usual MIT license text] If it turns out not to be covered by copyright, this is a no-op; if it is, it gives permission for more or less everything. S -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110124160711.ga3...@reptile.pseudorandom.co.uk
Re: data copyright or not -- what is Debian's take?
Le Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 10:44:34AM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko a écrit : Or should I advise to use the text of MIT license, verbally and explicitly describing possible uses and disclaiming any warranty? but once again without any copyright statement. Dear Yaroslav, licenses of the family of the MIT or the BSD require to to reproduce copyright statements on derivatives, and I think that it would cause headaches to many to attempt to seriously comply with them. We are blessed that a lot of data is truly in the U.S. public domain and therefore we can use it completely freely. In case deposition in the public domain is not permitted by the law, I would recommend to use very permissive terms. Some people keep it short, with the WTFPL or the politically correcter BOLA, and some people prefer longer terms to hammer the fact that by giving their data, they can not be responsible for disappointments, errors or misuses made by third parties. The Creative Commons Zero was invented for that case. http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ http://blitiri.com.ar/p/bola/ http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/ In any case, I recommend to not use the MIT or equivalent licenses that are picky on copyright reproduction, unless it is the will of the copyright holders to have their names accompanying each and every derivative. But can you imagine the mess if one had to track which contributor to acknowledge when reproducing an extract of the human genome ? Cheers, -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110125055904.ga...@merveille.plessy.net
