Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
On Sat, Feb 09, 2013 at 06:51:54PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: It wouldn't make sense to assign copyright to the Debian Project, but it might make sense to assign it to some of our trusted organization, like SPI. I'm myself not aware of mechanisms offered by SPI to allow volunteer copyright assignment. Hence I've just asked on the spi-general mailing list if that is something the organization is interested in supporting. I'll let you know if I hear back of anything actionable; in the mean time you can follow the discussion there. The thread is at http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2013-February/003156.html In essence, at present there is no standardized mechanisms to assign copyright (or enter into specific licensing agreements, e.g. to delegate SPI the power to do license enforcement and/or relicensing) to SPI. My inquiry has raised some interest in the matter and things might change in the future, but they are not there yet. There are entities using copyright notices Copyright (c) SPI... (as we do in our website), but the validity of that practice is dubious. I'm myself skeptical it would do any good when it really comes to needing it, but IANAL. Bottom line: sorry Thomas, not much help at the moment. But thanks to your inquiry things might change in the future. (And might change faster if someone interested and knowledgeable on these matters will join SPI and help out.) Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
Thomas Koch writes (Copyright assignement for Debian tools?): I'm currently hacking on the maven-repo-helper package. The source code contains copyright statements from the original author. Now when I add classes it would be logical to add Copyright 2013 Thomas Koch. Right. But I don't see any sense in this. I've no interest to be the copyright holder. I'd much rather like to write Copyright 2013 The Debian Project. (Actually I'm totally annoyed by anything related to copyright...) I see. Do you have any advise for code that originates in the Debian project? Well, I would advise you to retain your copyright and publish your code under a suitable licence. Ie write Copyright (C)2013 Thomas Koch This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. But if you don't want to do that, you do have the possibility to assign it to Software in the Public Interest. I'm not sure how the law works exactly in your jurisdiction but in the UK and the US to do that you need state it in writing. Something like: Written/modified by Thomas Koch, 2013. I hereby assign my copyright in Gnomovision (all past and future versions) to Software in the Public Interest, Inc. - Thomas Koch 21 Feb 2013 Copyright (C)2013 Software in the Public Interest, Inc This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. NB that in your jurisdiction it might be necessary to write something on paper or something, but in the UK and the US AFAICT writing it in a computer file is sufficient. SPI doesn't encourage you to do this. But they do promise what they will do with the copyright if you choose to disregard that advice: http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/resolutions/1998/1998-11-16.iwj.2/ See s3 of that resolution in particular. Ian. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20774.14706.554495.804...@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
On Mon, February 11, 2013 14:54, Antonio Terceiro wrote: There are several cases where upstream explicitly puts Copyright 2013 The Foo Developers and similar statements. Are they invalid as well? If they are valid, wouldn't Copyright 2013 Debian Project have the similar (if not the same) meaning? I do not think such claims are invalid: when there's a clear definition of what The Foo Developers means (e.g., it's expanded in a central README file), then its nothing more than a shorthand for the set of people claiming copyright on the work. The actual, legal copyright is in the hands of the people the string expands to. In the case at hand, you could indeed add Copyright 2013 Debian Project but because that doesn't expand to a clear set of legal rights holders, I believe this would not have the desired effect, namely that a single legal entity owns the copyright which then has the possibility to make decisions on that copyright. Cheers, Thijs -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/f344cfd64e5c9d2358e26806e5afa481.squir...@aphrodite.kinkhorst.nl
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
Antonio Terceiro terce...@debian.org writes: There are several cases where upstream explicitly puts Copyright 2013 The Foo Developers and similar statements. Are they invalid as well? If they are valid, wouldn't Copyright 2013 Debian Project have the similar (if not the same) meaning? *All* copyright statements are close to legally meaningless. The only truly important thing that one has to do with copyright statements in Debian is to retain them as required by the license. (Many licenses explicitly require that you retain the copyright notice.) We also ask that people copy them into debian/copyright so that we have clear documentation of who upstream claims are the copyright holders. In all countries that are signatories of Berne (which is essentially all of them), no copyright notice is required and copyright is held by the author (or the person who contracts the work for hire) regardless of any copyright notice. The only purpose that copyright notices are permitted to serve under the Berne convention is that they can affect damages in the event of a lawsuit. In the event of a lawsuit, I suspect that a judge would take a look at whether the copyright notice was clear for that purpose. (In the US, the primary legal purpose the copyright notice serves is to pre-empt a defense of innocent infringement.) See http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/17C4.txt for all the gory details in the US. Each other country probably has its own version of the law, and they're probably all at least slightly different (sometimes significantly different in countries with a stronger moral rights doctrine than the United States). -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/877gme90n7@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 09:14:12AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: If you are contributing to copyleft projects, it is important to have diverse copyright holders to prevent converting projects to proprietary licenses. FWIW, we are far from having consensus on this aspect in the free software world at large. For many, copyright assignments to trusted, transparent, and non-profits entities is a good thing, because: 1/ it makes licensing enforcements easier in court, and 2/ allow to switch between free software licenses (or even only decide whether you want to move to an or later version of a license or not) downstream even in case of dramatic events like the death of copyright holders. This is the reason why entities like FSF and KDE e.V. offer the possibility of centralizing copyright ownership. In essence: YMMV. But it seems to me that we are by no mean near a point where, in the public debate on FOSS policies, it is well established whether this specific kind of copyright assignment is good or bad. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
Hi, I'm currently hacking on the maven-repo-helper package. The source code contains copyright statements from the original author. Now when I add classes it would be logical to add Copyright 2013 Thomas Koch. But I don't see any sense in this. I've no interest to be the copyright holder. I'd much rather like to write Copyright 2013 The Debian Project. (Actually I'm totally annoyed by anything related to copyright...) Do you have any advise for code that originates in the Debian project? CC-ing debian-java but this discussion might be best for debian-project. If you think that it makes sense to identify the original author of some code: there is still the @author annotation in many languages. And the best thing is to use the appropriate tool for exactly this: git blame (or git praise!). Regards, Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201302091724.3.tho...@koch.ro
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
On Sat, Feb 09, 2013 at 05:23:59PM +0100, Thomas Koch wrote: I'm currently hacking on the maven-repo-helper package. The source code contains copyright statements from the original author. Now when I add classes it would be logical to add Copyright 2013 Thomas Koch. But I don't see any sense in this. I've no interest to be the copyright holder. I'd much rather like to write Copyright 2013 The Debian Project. (Actually I'm totally annoyed by anything related to copyright...) Do you have any advise for code that originates in the Debian project? In essence, you're asking for some sort of volunteer copyright assignment (or more likely contributor licensing agreement), similar to what KDE e.V. offers to contributors of the KDE project, see http://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php Those kind of agreements are entirely optional and interesting for contributors like you, who don't want to care about copyright related matter and empower trusted 3rd party entities to take care of them (e.g. for licensing enforcements if/when the need arises). It wouldn't make sense to assign copyright to the Debian Project, but it might make sense to assign it to some of our trusted organization, like SPI. I'm myself not aware of mechanisms offered by SPI to allow volunteer copyright assignment. Hence I've just asked on the spi-general mailing list if that is something the organization is interested in supporting. I'll let you know if I hear back of anything actionable; in the mean time you can follow the discussion there. Thanks for raising this topic! Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli lea...@debian.org wrote: On Sat, Feb 09, 2013 at 05:23:59PM +0100, Thomas Koch wrote: I'm currently hacking on the maven-repo-helper package. The source code contains copyright statements from the original author. Now when I add classes it would be logical to add Copyright 2013 Thomas Koch. But I don't see any sense in this. I've no interest to be the copyright holder. I'd much rather like to write Copyright 2013 The Debian Project. (Actually I'm totally annoyed by anything related to copyright...) Do you have any advise for code that originates in the Debian project? In essence, you're asking for some sort of volunteer copyright assignment (or more likely contributor licensing agreement), similar to what KDE e.V. offers to contributors of the KDE project, see http://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php Those kind of agreements are entirely optional and interesting for contributors like you, who don't want to care about copyright related matter and empower trusted 3rd party entities to take care of them (e.g. for licensing enforcements if/when the need arises). It wouldn't make sense to assign copyright to the Debian Project, but it might make sense to assign it to some of our trusted organization, like SPI. I'm myself not aware of mechanisms offered by SPI to allow volunteer copyright assignment. Hence I've just asked on the spi-general mailing list if that is something the organization is interested in supporting. I'll let you know if I hear back of anything actionable; in the mean time you can follow the discussion there. Thanks for raising this topic! Zack, It may also be worth reaching out to the Software Freedom Conservancy if this turns out to be out of scope for SPI http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/ (If I recall the SFLC helped get them off the ground, and they were founded to own projects that weren't a good fit for the FSF's GNU project). -Brian Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/cacfairw6bhc+yctg78wfynzmnkkf_t7hjowaaixqas+hmk-...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
On Sat, Feb 09, 2013 at 01:00:27PM -0500, Brian Gupta wrote: It may also be worth reaching out to the Software Freedom Conservancy if this turns out to be out of scope for SPI http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/ (If I recall the SFLC helped get them off the ground, and they were founded to own projects that weren't a good fit for the FSF's GNU project). Thanks Brian. As a matter of fact, I discuss with Bradley (Conservancy's Executive Director) fairly regularly and I've in the past discussed with him the possibilities of benefiting of SF Conservancy services as Debian Project. The problem is that SF Conservancy, for various good reasons, adopt a more exclusive model than SPI. They generally do not welcome projects that have assets (of various kinds) scattered throughout different organizations, which is the case for Debian. This has been a blocker in the past. It *might* be that voluntary copyright assignments are a special case, especially if SPI does not offer that service, but I very much doubt it. Either way, several people active in SF Conservancy people are also active on SPI mailing list, so we won't miss chances of collaborating on this if there are some! Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
Stefano Zacchiroli lea...@debian.org writes: Thanks Brian. As a matter of fact, I discuss with Bradley (Conservancy's Executive Director) fairly regularly and I've in the past discussed with him the possibilities of benefiting of SF Conservancy services as Debian Project. The problem is that SF Conservancy, for various good reasons, adopt a more exclusive model than SPI. They generally do not welcome projects that have assets (of various kinds) scattered throughout different organizations, which is the case for Debian. This has been a blocker in the past. Doesn't Debian as a whole also have nearly as many assets as all other projects in the Software Freedom Conservancy put together? It may not be healthy for them to take on Debian, as we could fairly easily turn into the tail that wags the dog. I think they mostly deal with much smaller projects than we are. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87txpls39q@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
On Sat, Feb 09, 2013 at 11:20:17AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: Doesn't Debian as a whole also have nearly as many assets as all other projects in the Software Freedom Conservancy put together? In terms of reserves, it might be. But in terms of expenses / revenue they're way more active than we are due to the fact they have employees (for the orga itself or on behalf of affiliated projects), revenues from court settlement, etc. Both SPI and SFC are very transparent in their budgets, so anyone can check the actual numbers. ... here we're getting off-topic I suspect :) -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
Le Sat, Feb 09, 2013 at 05:23:59PM +0100, Thomas Koch a écrit : I've no interest to be the copyright holder. I'd much rather like to write Copyright 2013 The Debian Project. (Actually I'm totally annoyed by anything related to copyright...) Hi Thomas, I share the same feeling and in some of my latest packages, I simply make no mention of copyright for my contributions, so that they are distributed under the same terms as the whole. Cheers, -- Charles -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130209223343.gb17...@falafel.plessy.net
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
On 10/02/2013 03:14, Paul Wise wrote: My advice would just to put Copyright 2013 Thomas Koch and a DFSG-free license, anything else would be more effort on your part. I've considered using Copyright 2013 Debian Project for the licensing of packaging that's intended to go into Debian. What would happen if I do that? Would the package get rejected? Is it possible for an entity like Debian to gain copyright to something if it's more or less unknowingly? -Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/51171c10.9070...@ubuntu.com
Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) jonat...@ubuntu.com writes: On 10/02/2013 03:14, Paul Wise wrote: My advice would just to put Copyright 2013 Thomas Koch and a DFSG-free license, anything else would be more effort on your part. I've considered using Copyright 2013 Debian Project for the licensing of packaging that's intended to go into Debian. What would happen if I do that? Would the package get rejected? Is it possible for an entity like Debian to gain copyright to something if it's more or less unknowingly? I'm not sure what the ftp-team would do, but that statement is basically legally meaningless. It doesn't change the fact that you personally hold the copyright, it doesn't give anyone in Debian (or Software in the Public Interest) the ability to defend the license in court... it basically has the same amount of effect as putting the moon is made of green cheese in your packaging. (There may be some impact on seeking statutory damages in countries like the US where damages can change based on the presence of a copyright notice, but that's pretty much an edge case.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/878v6woj5e@windlord.stanford.edu
