Daniel Carrera wrote:
Scott Carr wrote:
If you can not prove where every piece of the document comes from,
and who worked on it, then you are basically giving up the document.
I don't think that's right. None of the open source licenses have a
requirement to track changes, and there are some very smart lawyers
who have worked on "open source" since before it was called open
source, and none of them have added this sort of requirement to any
FOSS license.
Have you ever tried to submit to the Free Software Foundation? They
allow GPL, but everyone has to sign a Copyright Assignment before they
can submit to specific projects.
If you cannot prove where a specific piece of the document came from,
you also open up yourself to litigation by corporate entities.
Let's say for instance Microsoft decides a specific section of the
User Guide was stolen from them. We would have to figure out who
worked on said section, and be able to track where it came from.
No.
1) It is up to Microsoft to prove that you stole something, not up to
you to prove that you didn't.
2) You cannot "prove" where the document came from simply by putting a
list of changes on the front page. Anyone can write anything on the
front page. Having a list of changes there proves nothing in a court.
3) If you *did* prove that section xyz was inserted by Joe Smith, that
doesn't prove that it was or wasn't copied.
As stated, I am not a lawyer. This is what I have picked on from talks
I have heard with Free Software Foundation, etc.
The argument you posed confuses identity with security. Knowing the
name of the submitter doesn't tell you anything about the legality of
the submission. In converse, if Microsoft can show sufficient
similarity between a section in the document and one that they own,
copyright infringement has been proven regardless of who committed it,
and it has to be removed.
Knowing the name of the submitter doesn't help directly, but it does
help to be able to prove something. If two items are similar, as
OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, it IS possible to have sections
that are VERY similar. If you can prove that the OOo version was not
based on the other, then it is possible the court would throw it out.
This is all possibilities. But, the more OpenOffice.org gets into the
limelight the more chance that someone will try any or all of these
legal tactics.
Otherwise the whole document could be taken down, because the project
couldn't prove that one section.
This is not true. Microsoft would have to prove that it was copied,
and that the copy was not covered under fair use. If Microsoft did
succeed in doing that, you wouldn't have to take down the whole
document. You'd have to remove the offending section.
I was taking worst case scenario.
OpenOffice.org is being designed so that corporate and private
interests can be maintained. If we let everyone do anything they
want, then corporate interests would look at the project as a legal
minefield.
This is a straw man. No one has suggested that we let anyone do
anything they want. Jean and Peter have discussed the merits of
letting the user choose a different license for his work.
Cheers,
Daniel.
Wasn't saying anyone was going for that. That was me getting caught up
in what I was typing. ;-)
Authors CAN choose different licenses for their work. We just can't put
it on the OOo site. We will provide a link to the document though.
This particular list can't change this policy, because it has been set
by the Community Council. I particularly don't mind the PDL.
Keep in mind that CSV doesn't do anything for us on the PDL. I still
have to go into the document itself and manually update the submission
form with the people that worked on the document.
--
Scott Carr
OpenOffice.org
Documentation Co-Lead
http://documentation.openoffice.org
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