On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 7:24 AM, Hannes Magnusson <hannes.magnus...@gmail.com > wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:08, Robinson Tryon <bishop.robin...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > It shouldn't take too long to fix this -- I'd just add a note in the > > documentation section of the PHP license page along the lines of "All > > example code in the PHP manual, including user notes, are additionally > > available under the terms of the New BSD License," and then link to a > > local copy of the New (i.e. the 3-clause) BSD License. > > > The fix is easy, but it has many legal implications :) > > We also would have to update several other pages describing the manual > pages, such as the add-notes page, and the license document in the > manual itself. > > Also, who exactly is "The Documentation Group"? When we changed the > manual license it was relatively obvious that we had to contact the > authors listed on the frontpage, but who is in the group for the user > notes and manual code examples? :( > > -Hannes > All, I'm not 100% sure I believe we actually have an issue here. The manual as a whole is licensed under the CC-BY 3.0 license; that is, were someone to duplicate a considerable amount of the manual verbatim, they would be obligated to credit The Documentation Group as the authors/maintainers of the documentation. However, use of small parts of the manual, or even whole code snippets, would not rise to the level of copyright infringement if the author refused to attribute those snippets to The Documentation Group. In fact, I would argue that this use would fall under the Fair Use doctrine in many cases. The fact that authors of notes are made explicitly aware of the fact that their notes become available as a part of the PHP manual, and that they intentionally surrender their intellectual property rights as a part of their submission, says to me that the practical effect of the license and enforcement thereof becomes our responsibility. All of this has been a long route to saying the following: anyone who uses a small piece of a code snippet, changing it or not for their own needs, does not necessarily rise to the level of infringing upon the copyright of the snippet's owner(s) simply by doing so, and thus doesn't necessarily obligate them to credit the author under the Creative Commons license. While wholesale duplication of the manual and its contents without attribution would be a clear violation, minor, inconsequential use does not necessarily qualify. Now, the two caveats here are this: first, I'm not a lawyer by trade, but a software developer. And second, this interpretation may not be compatible with certain licenses (the GPL in particular seems to think it can rewrite copyright law and limit fair use and define how derivative works are handled, both of which are it's problem). That all being said, I'm still not sure we have any obligation to change the license at all. Brandon
