Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
Evan Prodromou wrote: On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 19:08, MJ Ray wrote: Numerous people have tried many angles. More are welcome, as we clearly haven't found the correct approach yet. So, I'd like to write a draft summary for the 6 Creative Commons 2.0 licenses: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Why, thank you. Four of them (with NonCommercial or NoDerivatives elements) are clearly not intended to be DSFG-free. It seems to the untrained eye that the other two (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike) are. The problems we have with these licenses are more or less ones of clarity and wording rather than intention. And they're the same problems summarized earlier about the Creative Commons 1.0 licenses. (1) The trademark notices in the box at the bottom should be clearly not part of the license. It needs to *say* this in the legal code page, in visible text (not an HTML comment). (2) DRM requirement is unclear. You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement. What precisely is a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement? This may seem to prohibit encrypted distribution, even if plaintext distribution is simultaneously available to the same people. The belief on debian-legal is that you should require unencumbered distribution alongside encumbered distribution, rather than outright prohibiting encumbered distribution. (2 how-to-fix) This can be fixed easily by writing something like the following: You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement -- unless you also simultaneously distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work to the same recipients without such measures. (There may be other ways to fix this clause.) (3) The requirement to remove all references to the author on demand. If You create a Collective Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collective Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author, as requested. If You create a Derivative Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Derivative Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author, as requested. (3a) First of all, this seems to be very difficult to reconcile with the credit requirement. If I am required to: '...give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work...' then how can I remove the references to the Original Author while complying with the license? Perhaps leaving the credit in is allowed under to the extent practicable, but if so it should be made clear. Conversely, perhaps omitting the credit is permitted if the author requests removal of his name, but if so that should be made clear. (3b) Second, this restricts entirely reasonable uses of the author's name. Suppose Mein Kampf was licensed under CC-by. If I made a collective work containing it, and also essays on how evil Hitler was, Hitler could request the removal of his name from the collective work. This would effectively prohibit the publication of the collective work. Come on! If the to the extent practicable is intended to allow this, again, it needs to be made more explicit. (3 how-to-fix) I think this is intended along similar lines to the BSD no-promotion clauses (which are silly and pointless anyway). If so, I believe what you want to say is something vaguely like this: If You create a Collective Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collective Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author (as requested) which may appear to endorse or promote the Collective Work. If You create a Derivative Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Derivative Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author (as requested) which may appear to endorse or promote the Derivative Work. If not, I really want to know what the purpose *is*, so that we can suggest a fix. (4) comparable authorship credit prominence requirement is too vague Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however,
Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
posted mailed Thibaut VARENE wrote: First, let me try to define what I'm calling non-software: Stop. Call it non-programs. Here, when we say software, we mean it ain't hardware. snip Now, the whole idea of applying the same freeness criteria to what I call non-software content, looks like a complete nonsense to me, Well, Debian disagrees. There have been two GRs about this issue as well as years of discussion. We have very good reasons for disagreeing; namely, that every valuable freedom for programs has turned out to be a valuable freedom for other works as well. snip 2) We're forgetting section 4 of the SC: Our priorities are our users and free software. It seems to me that some of the DDs i've seen posting lately have turned that into Our priorities are free software. snip Well, if we forget our users that way, depriving them of what they need and want, of facilities others provide them with (documentation is one of them, I'd go flamish and mention some firmware as well); We provide the non-free archive for this purpose; to provide software which some users need and want, but which is not free. There is no excuse for having it in 'main'. I, as a user, would probably turn back and find what I need elsewhere than in Debian. And I'm pretty confident I'm not an exception, in such a behaviour as a user. You are an exception if you do not consider the non-free archive sufficient for this purpose. snip I do not intend to flame or sound pedantic in here, I just want to make sure we, as a project, do not forget who we are working for, and what it takes to satisfy our *priorities*. Then educate yourself about the issues first. Read some of the last two years' discussions and summaries thereof. PS: nothing I've said here is private. Or new. -- There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 09:11:08AM -0800, D. Starner wrote: Now, the whole idea of applying the same freeness criteria to what I call non-software content, looks like a complete nonsense to me, Can we give it up? We've had at least a year of discussion on this subject, then a vote, then long flame-wars all over the place, then another vote, since people were upset about the results of the first vote. The two votes clearly indicate the will of the developers. The decision has been made; can we bury what's left of the horse now? Why, particularly, should he deviate from the fine example set by Craig Sanders and other supporters of Proposal D? -- G. Branden Robinson| One man's magic is another man's Debian GNU/Linux | engineering. Supernatural is a [EMAIL PROTECTED] | null word. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Robert Heinlein signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
On 2004-07-12 08:18:21 +0100 Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Why, particularly, should he deviate from the fine example set by Craig Sanders and other supporters of Proposal D? Craig Sanders himself voted Further Discussion as second preference and ignored all other outcomes, despite claiming We had enough discussion on this subject and some of us are sick of it in his rationale. Most of his supporters did the same. I think it's a bit late to start expecting consistent behaviour. -- MJR/slefMy Opinion Only and not of any group I know http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing Matthew Garrett is quite the good sort of fellow, despite what my liver is sure to say about him in [...] 40 years -- branden
Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
Four of them (with NonCommercial or NoDerivatives elements) are clearly not intended to be DSFG-free. It seems to the untrained eye that the other two (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike) are. The problems we have with these licenses are more or less ones of clarity and wording rather than intention. My doubt is: dfsg should cover the 4 freedom of fsf. How does CC respect the availability of source code? I mean FDL does something like that with the provision of a copy in an open format when you distribute a certenly amount of copies. Can we consider dfsg-free a song which can be playd just in MSplayer, or a text readable just whit adobe reader? Tom _ ---o0o--- Aconsegueix [EMAIL PROTECTED] gratuÏtament a http://teatre.com :-))-:
Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
On 7/6/2004, tom [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My doubt is: dfsg should cover the 4 freedom of fsf. How does CC respect the availability of source code? I mean FDL does something like that with the provision of a copy in an open format when you distribute a certenly amount of copies. Can we consider dfsg-free a song which can be playd just in MSplayer, or a text readable just whit adobe reader? IANAL, but here's my 2 cents (I'm expressing my own opinion here, and I'm not discussing law issues): First, let me try to define what I'm calling non-software: Any _creation_ which original source is not: plain (human readable) text, intended to be processed by a compiler to be turned into machine readable code , is not software to me. This is certainly not a perfect definition, but IANAL. Now, the whole idea of applying the same freeness criteria to what I call non-software content, looks like a complete nonsense to me, and I feel and fear this will lead us (the Debian project) to massive havoc. Given the time spent in shilly-shally about this, and the serious outcomes arising, given the various examples of problematic issues, not to say dead-ends (let's add one more: what about an argentic photography that would be scanned for documentation illustration purpose, what's its source code, or whatever? The negative? The positive inprint? the first digital form? In what format then?...), it looks to me that: 1) We're spinning around. 2) We're forgetting section 4 of the SC: Our priorities are our users and free software. It seems to me that some of the DDs i've seen posting lately have turned that into Our priorities are free software. Well, if we forget our users that way, depriving them of what they need and want, of facilities others provide them with (documentation is one of them, I'd go flamish and mention some firmware as well); I, as a user, would probably turn back and find what I need elsewhere than in Debian. And I'm pretty confident I'm not an exception, in such a behaviour as a user. Now the question is: do we want to provide some kind of elitist distribution, aimed at a very small subset of free-fundamentalist developers, or do we want to provide a user friendly and broad distribution? To me (again, it's my sole opinion), it is quite obvious that you don't need to have gone through a 10-year philosophical course to tell that the former do not require much compromise, looks quite manichean (everything is white or black, 1 or 0), and is quite easy to achieve, whereas the latter DO require compromise and mitigation, and shades of grey. I do not intend to flame or sound pedantic in here, I just want to make sure we, as a project, do not forget who we are working for, and what it takes to satisfy our *priorities*. HTH, Thibaut VARENE PS: nothing I've said here is private.
Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
On Tue, 2004-07-06 at 09:23, tom wrote: My doubt is: dfsg should cover the 4 freedom of fsf. I think this is a non-issue. The DFSG is the DFSG, nothing more or less. How does CC respect the availability of source code? The licenses neither enforce nor prevent a licensee's distribution of source code. Enforcing distribution of source code is not part of the DFSG, though, and we consider works under licenses that don't enforce source code distribution (e.g., 3-clause BSD) to be Free. Of course, our project's experience shows that just having a source-available license on some software doesn't necessarily make the source available. I believe availability of source code (the first half of DFSG #2) is an attribute of the package, and distributability of source code (the second half) is an attribute of the license. And I think that the CC licenses make redistribution of source code OK. Can we consider dfsg-free a song which can be playd just in MSplayer, or a text readable just whit adobe reader? Absolutely. The problem with secret and/or obfuscated file formats is not that you can't read or use them on some player or another; it's that they're hard or impossible to modify. I'd think, though, that if there were no Free player for a work, it couldn't go into main. It'd be pretty fair to say that a work depends, in the Debian sense, on some kind of player. ~ESP P.S. Tom, I CC'd you on this since I'm not sure if you're on debian-legal. If you are, sorry for the double-post. -- Evan Prodromou [EMAIL PROTECTED] signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
Now, the whole idea of applying the same freeness criteria to what I call non-software content, looks like a complete nonsense to me, Can we give it up? We've had at least a year of discussion on this subject, then a vote, then long flame-wars all over the place, then another vote, since people were upset about the results of the first vote. The two votes clearly indicate the will of the developers. The decision has been made; can we bury what's left of the horse now? -- ___ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 19:08, MJ Ray wrote: Numerous people have tried many angles. More are welcome, as we clearly haven't found the correct approach yet. So, I'd like to write a draft summary for the 6 Creative Commons 2.0 licenses: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Four of them (with NonCommercial or NoDerivatives elements) are clearly not intended to be DSFG-free. It seems to the untrained eye that the other two (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike) are. The problems we have with these licenses are more or less ones of clarity and wording rather than intention. We could hand this over to Creative Commons with some suggested changes, as well as some information about our project and why having works be DFSG-free is important. ~ESP -- Evan Prodromou [EMAIL PROTECTED] signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
