Seeking advice for #305732
Hello, the Firefox Help/About window reports something like All rights reserved. I was wondering if that conflicts with being licensed under the MPL, or if it's just a way of saying this is not in the public domain. Having touched the edges of my ignorance, I'm asking here. Ciao, Enrico P.S. Please keep me or the bug address Cc-ed: I'm not subscribed to debian-legal. -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini [EMAIL PROTECTED] signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Seeking advice for #305732
Enrico Zini wrote: Hello, the Firefox Help/About window reports something like All rights reserved. I was wondering if that conflicts with being licensed under the MPL, or if it's just a way of saying this is not in the public domain. As I understand it (and this is a good time to emphasise that I am neither a lawyer nor a DD), the Mozilla Foundation exercise the rights granted in para 3.6 of the MPL[1] to distribute FF binaries under a highly restrictive license. See also, the FireFox binary EULA[2]. It is my understanding of the MPL that it is its intention to allow practically any license for binary distribution, as long as the source of any MPLed files (or files containing MPLed code) is made available, and the end-user is made aware of this. As anyone receiving the source under the MPL has the same liberal choice of binary license, such a license need not apply to anything you build yourself from the same source, even if it ended up being identical to the official FF binary. The MPL does not grant a trademark license, so if your binary was infringing the FireFox trademark, you would need to seek permission/forgiveness from the Mozilla Foundation. [1] - http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.txt [2] - http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/EULA/firefox-en.html -- Lewis Jardine IANAL, IANADD -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Seeking advice for #305732
On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 11:08:28AM +0100, Lewis Jardine wrote: As I understand it (and this is a good time to emphasise that I am neither a lawyer nor a DD), the Mozilla Foundation exercise the rights granted in para 3.6 of the MPL[1] to distribute FF binaries under a highly restrictive license. See also, the FireFox binary EULA[2]. It is my understanding of the MPL that it is its intention to allow practically any license for binary distribution, as long as the source of any MPLed files (or files containing MPLed code) is made available, and the end-user is made aware of this. As anyone receiving the source under the MPL has the same liberal choice of binary license, such a license need not apply to anything you build yourself from the same source, even if it ended up being identical to the official FF binary. The MPL does not grant a trademark license, so if your binary was infringing the FireFox trademark, you would need to seek permission/forgiveness from the Mozilla Foundation. Well, All rights reserved is a fairly generic part of a copyright statement, present in almost all licenses. (Apparently it has or had special meaning at some point, a boilerplate part of declaring copyright.) If there's a license granting permissions elsewhere, it's probably harmless. -- Glenn Maynard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 3)
Matthew Garrett wrote: I'm not convinced by the trademark argument - I think it's pretty clear from the HTML that it's not intended to be part of the license. Yes, it would be better if that was made clearer, but: a) CC appear to have said that it's not part of the license, and: This one falls, for me, under the since it's so easy to fix, why exactly aren't they fixing it? category. I did agree, once I found the HTML comment, that the current status does not render the license non-free. I sent a polite message many months ago asking them to fix the confusing web page -- which should be easy, as it doesn't involve changing the license -- but they did not respond. That began to make me wonder whether they actually had some reason for rendering the web page confusing, such as wanting the trademark terms to be binding. :-( -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 3)
On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 05:08:08PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: Matthew Garrett wrote: I'm not convinced by the trademark argument - I think it's pretty clear from the HTML that it's not intended to be part of the license. Yes, it would be better if that was made clearer, but: a) CC appear to have said that it's not part of the license, and: This one falls, for me, under the since it's so easy to fix, why exactly aren't they fixing it? category. ... and the fact that they refuse to fix such a simple thing bodes very ill for getting more serious problems fixed ... -- Glenn Maynard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: public domain
however I can't find any good resources on how to relinquish copyright. That's because under current US law there is no clear way to do so. *Please* complain to your congressman. :-/ I believe under European law it is usually impossible as well. Check it out and then complain to your parliament member. :-/ The various public domain dedications you will see vary in the degree to which they add complicated verbiage to try to get around this problem. None of them is perfect, because it's a serious legal problem, but Creative Commons's does pretty well. (Branden Robinson's is *way* more thorough.) It includes in perpetuity, which is important, as the law's default for such things is not in perpetuity. :-( I have suggested coming up with a clear as-if-public-domain license which would work in as many countries as we could manage. (Something like I release this work into the public domain. If that is legally impossible, then I grant a perpetual, irrevocable license to everyone who does, did, or will ever exist, to treat this work exactly as if it were in the public domain due to expiration of copyright, and as if it were in the public domain due to being ineligible for copyright.) Don't use that, by the way; I don't want to encourage license proliferation. I do feel that current public domain dedications are insufficient. Most people are OK with the MIT/X11 license though, so I haven't had much interest. Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of the Dedicator's heirs and successors. (the detriment part specifically as this seems to me as if it would make it possible for anybody except my heirs to use the docs) No, that's not what it means. The trouble is that a court might rule, otherwise, that you couldn't really have meant to deprive your heirs of your copyrights by giving them to the public domain. This precludes that. It is also an attempt to make the dedication binding on your heirs, who might claim that public domain dedication is invalid and impossible; at least it shows that they would be acting against your desires if they claimed that. Also, I don't want to be held responsible for ensuring that it's a benefit to the public, as somebody might e.g. find the word 'backup' offensive. You don't have to ensure that the *work* is of benefit to the public. Relinquishing exclusive monopoly rights (such as copyright) is presumably of benefit to the public, no matter what they're rights in. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: public domain
On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 05:33:54PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: however I can't find any good resources on how to relinquish copyright. That's because under current US law there is no clear way to do so. *Please* complain to your congressman. :-/ Huh? I've never heard of this. I've only heard of problems with the public domain in other jurisdictions (Germany?), not in the US. -- Glenn Maynard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: (DRAFT) FAQ on documentation licensing
Jacobo Tarrio wrote: This should be useful for people who ask about the GFDL, documentation licensing guidelines, etc. Comments, additions, removals, rewordings are allowed and requested. There are no invariant parts ;-) When/if it becomes more or less stable, it would be useful for the DFSG FAQ, I think... snip contents On a quick perusal, I like it all. :-) We probably actually need a FAQ about the meaning of software. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Netbiff license
Further discussion with upstream created this short license: Netbiff may be redistributed in any form without restriction. Netbiff comes with NO WARRANTY. Since this is a new license I'm asking debian-legal for completeness if there could be any problems with this licensing? It should be DFSG free as far as I can understand, right? Not quite. The problem is that copyright law ASSumes that you don't give permission to create modified versions unless you explicitly do. You would need something more like this: Netbiff may be modified in any way. Netbiff may be redistributed in any form, modified or unmodified, without restriction. Netbiff comes with NO WARRANTY. ...and beware of writing your own license. :-) -- You want a public-domain-equivalent license. There are several ways to do this. Since you really do want it to be public domain, I personally suggest: I place Netbiff in the public domain. If this is legally impossible, then I grant irrevocable, perpetual permission to everyone to treat Netbiff exactly as if it were in the public domain. Netbiff comes with NO WARRANTY. If *anything* accomplishes the goal of as-if-public-domain, then this should. (The warranty disclaimer is not really related to copyright law, as implied warranties are, IIRC, incurred by distribution rather than authorship, which is why you want it regardless of the license.) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: On the debian-legal Summary of Creative Commons 2.0
MJ Ray wrote: BSD: http://www.debian.org/misc/bsd.license MIT/X11: http://www.x.org/Downloads_terms.html Unfortunately, that is a subtly different X11 license from the one at opensource.org. :-( (X11 stuff is actually under a mix of very similar but not quite identical licenses.) I prefer the one at opensource.org, because it lacks the unnecessary name of a copyright holder shall not be used... to promote... clause. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: GFDL/GPL incompatibility
Michael K. Edwards wrote: As I see it, the individuals who assigned their copyright in GNU documentation to the FSF probably didn't expect to see the relicensing of their work under a GPL-incompatible license, creating yet another gated community carved out of the ostensible commons. You're quite right. I know Zack Weinberg -- author of a large portion of the GNU cpp manual -- didn't, and dislikes the policy, to mention someone who was willing to make his views public. I personally stopped submitting copyrightable amounts of documentation to GNU when I figured out what was going on. This, of course, indicates a problem at the heart of the FSF: Stallman has been able to unilaterally impose a bad licensing policy, which the vast majority of GNU developers think is a bad idea. He hasn't even been able to point to two other people who agree with him about the GFDL (Georg Greve *might* count as one person, *maybe*, though his views seem rather different), yet it remains official FSF dogma. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: public domain
Glenn Maynard wrote: Huh? I've never heard of this. I've only heard of problems with the public domain in other jurisdictions (Germany?), not in the US. In pre-BCIA (1989) US law, copyright was surrendered by deliberately publishing without a copyright notice. This was pretty much the standard method, and I am not aware of any other method being sanctioned by the courts or the law. Since 1989 that method has simply not been available, since copyright is fully automatic. I am not aware of any court case since 1989 which established the ability to deliberately place a work in the public domain by any other method. (For such a case to actually arise would either require an author who reneged, or more likely an author who died and whose heirs reneged, so it's not actually surprising that one hasn't shown up in a mere 15 years.) Although I'm not the best at legal research -- if you are aware of one, please tell us! Such a case would give some very good hints as to how to write a public domain dedication so that it would hold up in court. The worry is that public domain dedications may only have the effect of highly permissive license grants in the US, and may therefore not actually provide the full benefits of public domain status in one or more ways; including possible unlilateral license revocation by the grantor or heirs (since such a license would probably not qualify legally as a contract). So write your congressman and ask that authors be given a clear method to put their works in the public domain, rendering them free from copyright forever. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Netbiff license
On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Nathanael Nerode wrote: You want a public-domain-equivalent license. There are several ways to do this. Since you really do want it to be public domain, I personally suggest: I place Netbiff in the public domain. If this is legally impossible, then I grant irrevocable, perpetual permission to everyone to treat Netbiff exactly as if it were in the public domain. Netbiff comes with NO WARRANTY. That's more or less what I'm looking for. Is that language sufficient? Is the term public domain unambiguous enough to use in this setting? In all countries? -Peff -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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