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

[Richard Fontana]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 04:14:32PM -0400, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> The U.S. statute defines the elements of a copyright notice, which are the ©
> symbol, the word "Copyright" or the abbreviation "Copr.," the year of first
> publication of the work, and (the critical question here) "the name of the
> owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be
> recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner."  So
> keeping in mind that from a legal perspective it really doesn't matter much if
> we have a copyright notice, and that there is latitude in how one identifies
> the owner, I would vote for "Fedora Project Contributors."  I think that's
> accurate for the purposes of the statutory requirements and, since the actual
> names are available on a contributions page, it is more than enough to identify
> the authors for those people who use the copyright notice as a lead for finding
> the actual copyright owners.

I'm okay with that. 

> As pointed out by others, for those using content under the CC-BY-SA license we
> should state clearly somewhere how we would like the attribution.  

This is already done in the default Fedora docs CC BY-SA notice by
designating the Fedora Project as the "Attribution Party" (a term used
in CC BY-SA 3.0). I suppose we could be clearer about what that
actually means.

> I also agree with Richard that we should carve out the copyright in the logo
> from any license grant.

Yes, the original intent of the current notice language was to
indicate that but I think it can be made clearer. 

The entire legal notice actually needs to be revisited because of the
FPCA too (I assume contributors to docs are typically in cla-done or
whatever it's called). The idea of Red Hat being "the licensor of this
document" may have made sense under the old Fedora CLA regime but I
think it does not make sense under the FPCA (because the inbound
content license is now CC BY-SA by default).

- RF