Proposal: end Gilligan's Island copyright notices in Fedora docs

Fri Jun 24 14:41:59 UTC 2011

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 00:58, David Nalley
<david.nalley at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:32 AM, Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I think the following issue is partly one of policy so I am first
>> raising it here. For those who don't know who I am, I am a Red Hat
>> lawyer and among other things I deal with software and documentation
>> copyright and licensing issues.
>>
>> Formal Fedora-branded documentation uses a default legal notice that
>> among other things uses the following universal copyright notice:
>>
>>  Copyright © <YEAR> Red Hat, Inc. and others.
>>
>> followed by, typically, a CC BY-SA license notice and some trademark
>> notice boilerplate.
>>
>> If I remember correctly, this is implemented via the Fedora Publican
>> brand package.
>>
>> This form of copyright notice is found elsewhere in the Fedora
>> universe, as in the footer of fp.o web pages.
>>
>> I recognize the convenience of a universal legal notice for purposes
>> of automating generation of documentation, but there is something
>> about it that bothers me. Consider two examples: the Fedora 14 Amateur
>> Radio Guide and the Fedora 15 Musician's Guide.  From what I can tell,
>> the actual authors of these documents are not, and were not at time of
>> authorship, Red Hat employees. (Moreover, it is not necessarily the
>> case, in any given situation, that Red Hat would be copyright holder
>> of all or some of the text even if they had been Red Hat employees,
>> but for simplicity let's ignore that issue.)
>>
>> Now, the copyright notice is correct nonetheless because Red Hat holds
>> copyright on the Fedora logo image, and, as I recall, all
>> documentation includes some standard language (like the typographical
>> conventions section) over which, let us assume, Red Hat has some
>> copyright interest.
>>
>> Nevertheless, why should a document that was actually written
>> exclusively by non-Red-Hat employees use "Copyright Red Hat, Inc. and
>> others" (what a friend of mine has called a "Gilligan's Island
>> copyright" after the original Gilligan's Island theme song which
>> famously referred to the important characters of the Professor and
>> Mary Ann as "and the rest")?
>>
>> I don't think the Red Hat copyright ownership of the Fedora logo image
>> justifies the Gilligan's Island copyright notice, as in fact the CC
>> BY-SA license notice is designed (and perhaps should be improved in
>> this regard, even though it ought to be obvious) to make clear that
>> the logo image itself isn't being licensed under CC BY-SA. So if
>> anything it is the intention for the copyright notice *not* to refer
>> to the logo. (And, if you want a copyright notice because of the logo,
>> have a special line saying "Logo copyright <year> Red Hat, Inc.") And
>> while Red Hat might hold copyright on some small standard portions of
>> the text, the substantial part of what is creative and expressive in
>> the examples I gave were written by people unaffiliated with Red
>> Hat.
>>
>> So, in the case of at least that subset of Fedora documentation that
>> is written by those who aren't Red Hat employees (but perhaps, er, the
>> rest too), what purpose is the Gilligan's Island copyright notice
>> serving?  It doesn't provide the public notice of actual substantial
>> copyright ownership in at least some cases. It doesn't provide
>> attribution to the actual human authors. To me, all it really does is
>> communicate the following:
>>
>>  1) Red Hat has an intimate connection to the Fedora Project.
>>
>>  2) Red Hat is "first among equals" when it comes to attribution for
>>  Fedora project documentation; non-Red-Hat-associated contributors to
>>  Fedora documentation merit only second-class status.
>>
>> I submit that 1) is already rather obvious to the world and is, if
>> anything, problematically exaggerated in the public mind. I submit
>> that 2) is an inappropriate use of a copyright notice even if the
>> policy were legitimate. Copyright notices aren't supposed to be used
>> for attribution - I recognize that in free software they often do
>> serve that purpose - but if they *are* used for attribution,
>> attribution ought to be given to the human authors. Or to the Fedora
>> Project as collaborative thing. (A nice thing about CC licenses is
>> that they decouple attribution from copyright ownership, as in fact
>> you can see in the default documentation legal notice which states
>> that attribution is to be given to the Fedora Project -- not Red Hat.)
>>
>> I submit further that it serves no valid purpose to overemphasize the
>> degree to which Red Hat is the copyright holder of Fedora
>> documentation anyway. Fedora contributors do not assign copyright to
>> Red Hat. If you want to give credit to Red Hat, or overemphasize the
>> intimacy of the Fedora/Red Hat relationship, do so in some other way:
>> have a "The Fedora Project is sponsored by Red Hat" line or something
>> like that (though I don't see the point of that either, and if we
>> really cared about that I assume we would have had a requirement to
>> give attribution to Red Hat rather than the Fedora Project).
>>
>> It may be that the only practical alternative is not to have a
>> copyright notice at all. That is by no means beyond consideration,
>> given that copyright notices have rather limited significance anyway.
>> In the specific examples I noted above, I would say that what little
>> legal value copyright notices have is not present at all. This could
>> well be true of other cases.
>>
>> So I guess I'm interested in knowing whether there is a strong desire
>> (particularly among those on this list who are not Red Hat employees
>> yet who have contributed to Fedora documentation) to maintain the
>> tradition of the Gilligan's Island copyright notice, and whether
>> alternatives are feasible and preferable. The Musician's Guide shows
>> that one can prominently credit the principal human author of the
>> document at the beginning. The Amateur Radio Guide shows that one can
>> do the same thing but with "The Fedora Documentation Project" as the
>> author.
>>
>> If no such strong desire exists, it is my desire to recommend changes
>> that will eliminate the use of the Gilligan's Island copyright notice
>> in Fedora documentation.
>>
>>
>> - Richard
>
>
> Hi Richard,
>
> If I had my druthers, I'd like to see something along the lines of:
> 'Copyright © <YEAR> Fedora Project' if we used a copyright notice or
> perhaps even better:
> 'Copyright © <YEAR> Fedora Project Contributors'

I spoke with Spot on this while at SELF.  Because Fedora Project isn't
a legal entity it cannot hold a copyright.