Copyright notice (was: Docs Project meeting minutes 13 July 2011)

[Eric Christensen]

On Jul 15, 2011 3:10 PM, "Richard Fontana" <rfontana at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 02:53:55PM -0400, Eric Christensen wrote:
> >
> > On Jul 14, 2011 2:10 PM, "Petr Kovar" <pkovar at redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > As a follow-up to the copyright discussion we had during the IRC
meeting:
> > > my point was that some [previous] authors of Fedora docs were not
necessarily
> > > Fedora Contributors at time of authorship (like e.g. Eric
Foster-Johnson
> > > who wrote the original RPM Guide, AFAIK).
> >
> > IIRC, if the original work is licensed so we can make a derivative work,
like
> > we have in the case of the RPM Guide, the person making the derivative
owns the
> > copyright for their work and provides attribution back to the source.
>
> If a Fedora doc is based on some preexisting upstream work, the
> license requirements applicable to that preexisting work must be
> complied with. That may affect this issue, because it is common for
> licenses to require preservation of existing copyright notices. I
> don't recall how this affected the RPM Guide in particular.
>

So, what I'm hearing is that the copyright statement is on a case-by-case
basis.  To further complicate things it sounds as if we may need legal
review each time we work with a derivative work.

> > > Maybe adding "and others" at the end of the copyright notice would
solve the
> > > problem in such cases?
>
> No more Gilligan's Island copyright notices please. :-)
>
> I think there were additional issues with the RPM Guide which Karsten
> and I intended to examine.
>
>  - RF
>

--Eric
>
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