[Fedora-legal-list] policy on shipping/using flags
I recently found that Deluge is using country flags to indicate the location of bittorrent peers. Flags are cute and nice of course (and a mental exercise), but are geopolitical hot spots. Upstream didn't like the concern, calling some people (including me?) "crazy ideologists". But the Fedora maintainer (Peter Gordon) fixed the bug in Rawhide (but we're still shipping flags in F9 and F10): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479265 But this is not why I'm writing. I'm writing because during the report, I found that we really don't have any official policy on flags. All I found in the wiki was what I had written myself a while ago, here, which is just based on my own experience as an i18n guy: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Languages#I_wish_to_use_my_country.27s_flag_to_refer_to_my_language But we really need a policy. And I thought this list is the best forum to get it into shape. The history is like this: With RHL 8.0, Red Hat decided to remove the Taiwan/Republic of China flag from KDE because of sensitivities/legal requirements of mainland/People's Rebublic of China. That created some public unease, including people stopping to use RHL because of that. Red Hat went a bit further of course, and removed all national flags in a later version. This is not restricted to Red Hat of course. Microsoft is usually in the spotlight for such geopolitical concerns: On geopolitical issues resulting in a worse user experience for timezone selection: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679.aspx On swastika symbols in Japanese fonts causing user outrage (the characters were in Unicode at U+534D and U+5350): http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/dec03/12-12FontLetter.mspx These questions remain. Sorry for being a bit forward looking, but I would hate to revisit the issue later: * What is the exact policy for Fedora? Why? Is it because of Red Hat's liability or is there other reasons too? * How serious is shipping flags? Should they be removed as soon as they are discovered? For example, should Deluge remove them from F9 and F10 as well? * Should country flags be avoided at all costs, or is it just the association of countries/territories/languages with flags that should be avoided? For example, is it OK to use an icon showing three flags (of say, US, Italy, and France) to indicate a locale/language selection application? * What about organization/regional/political/historical/religious/linguistic flags? Examples: UN's flag (presently used as the default icon for System > Administration > Language in F10), Mississippi's flag, the LGBT flag, Hezollah's flag, the Confederate flag, the Jain flag, the Nazi flag, the Tibet flag, and the Esperanto flag. All of these could be controversial. * What about political symbols (including the stuff you see in coats of arms or in the middle of flags)? For example, is it OK to use the lebanese cedar to refer to an input method for Lebanese Arabic or use the Tajikistani crown to refer to the Tajik language? * What about flags used for edutainment purposes? For example, is it OK to ship an educational game that teaches kids about country flags or historical flags? Is it OK to use a flag for country/language selection in a game UI to be used by kids who can't read yet (but may be able to recognize flags for their country/language)? * Presently, the Unicode consortium is considering a proposal to encode various symbols (called emoji) used in Japanese cellphones in the Unicode Standard. This very large set includes flags of a few countries, like the flag of the People's Republic of China: http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/snapshot/utc.html#e-4E5 [warning: hundreds of small icons on the page] >From what I can tell, the proposal has a very high chance of acceptance, and those flags will become Unicode characters. When fonts we ship start to include glyphs for such flags, what do we do? Do we remove them from the fonts when shipping them? Thanks for reading until here, Roozbeh ___ Fedora-legal-list mailing list Fedora-legal-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legal-list
[Fedora-legal-list] Legal issues with new font guidelines
Hi. I was dutifully converting my font packages to the new guidelines, when I ran into a possible legal issue. For the sake of argument, let us assume a font licensed under OFL, called Mardana. The upstream tarball has two families inside, Mardana Sans and Mardana Serif, in TTF format. The text of the OFL license is not included in the TTFs themselves, but in a separate text file in the tarball. Actually, let's assume the TTFs themselves don't have any copyright or licensing metadata. According to the new font packaging guidelines, there would be three packages, mardana-fonts-common, mardana-serif-fonts, and mardana-sans-fonts. All documentation related files will be in *-common, and all the actual TTFs would be in *-sans-* and *-serif-*. So, someone finds about the fonts, wants to use them on Windows, searches for them, and finds our binary RPM for Mardana Sans, and downloads it. She then opens it with some tool and installs it on her machine. But that's a license violation by us: "2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled, redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user." But we are not providing any copyright notice or license in our binary RPM, that is supposedly the "software" that that Font Software is bundled with. All we say, is two pointers: "OFL" in the RPM license tag, and "mardana-fonts-common" in the requires tag. Of course, if the user really wants to, she can investigate the binary RPM, and find pointers to the actual license, and go and find the license. But we would not be redistributing the license with "each copy". Please enlighten me. Roozbeh ___ Fedora-legal-list mailing list Fedora-legal-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legal-list
[Fedora-legal-list] Re: policy on shipping/using flags
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Roozbeh Pournader wrote: > * Presently, the Unicode consortium is considering a proposal to > encode various symbols (called emoji) used in Japanese cellphones in > the Unicode Standard. This very large set includes flags of a few > countries, like the flag of the People's Republic of China: > > http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/snapshot/utc.html#e-4E5 > [warning: hundreds of small icons on the page] > > From what I can tell, the proposal has a very high chance of > acceptance, and those flags will become Unicode characters. When fonts > we ship start to include glyphs for such flags, what do we do? Do we > remove them from the fonts when shipping them? I am just back from the Unicode Technical Committee meeting. During the emoji discussions, as a GNOME's representatives to Unicode, I mentioned some of the controversial issues that will raise if Unicode encodes flags. The committee agreed to not encode those characters as flags, but only as place-holder characters for compatibility with Japanese telephone company standards. The characters are now only called Emoji Symbol GB, Emoji Symbol CN, Emoji Symbol RU, etc, and their glyphs are just the two letters in a dashed box, like this: http://unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/fontimg/AEmoji_E4ED.png So, no worries on this part of the flags issue anymore. Roozbeh ___ Fedora-legal-list mailing list Fedora-legal-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legal-list
[Fedora-legal-list] The Iran Question
On 18 Feb 2009, wrote: > We have a contributor from Iran. This is no news. Fedora has had quite a few contributors from Iran before. We have had Iranian package maintainers, bug reporters, code contributors, translators, ambassadors, etc already. They have been Iranian citizens, some living in (and contributing from) Iran, some living in the west (Canada, US, etc). > It is obvious to me that we can not directly provide him support [...] What makes it obvious? Are you thinking of any specific law? There are various United States laws restricting some kinds of business with "foreigners", but all of them detailed exceptions for this and that. > The first question in my mind is: what type of liability exists for us > to have 'members' of Fedora in such countries. I don't think we need to be extra careful with contributors from Iran, or any other countries, unless we talk about specific laws. Please don't let the media carry you away. Lots of Iran-related stuff I've encountered in the free software world are just based on FUD. So unless there is a specific law mentioned, one shouldn't don't worry. > The example I am > thinking of is if he as an individual downloads Fedora isos and > distributes them at an event in Iran, is there risk to us because he > is a member of the Fedora Project. That has already happened before quite a few times. I have personally downloaded such ISOs, burnt them to CDs, and distributed them in events in Iran when I lived there. I was an Iranian living in Iran, and the Iranian laws did not forbid me or my sponsors to do that, as far as I could tell (and we had lawyers look into it too). > Perhaps a better question is: What is he forbidden from doing. Whatever the Iranian laws forbids him to do. He is under Iranian jurisdiction. Tell him to talk to an Iranian lawyer. That's what I did. Roozbeh, One of the "Iranians" >:) ___ Fedora-legal-list mailing list Fedora-legal-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legal-list
