on 06/24/2011 12:32 AM Richard Fontana wrote:

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.

For those of you who don't know me, I am also a Red Hat lawyer and thought I'd pipe up too. I don't want Richard to have all the fun.

From a legal perspective, the copyright notice is just an artifact under U.S. law only (I'm aware of no other country where it matters) that has very little legal significance. It has no relevance to whether there is a license or the scope of the license; as Richard pointed out it is not meant to be used as attribution although commonly is; it has no effect on the enforceability of a copyright infringement claim except, possibly affecting the amount of monetary damages; and it is not a defense to any copyright infringement claim. That said, I agree with the comments that people expect to see one. If nothing else, it is a reminder that copyright ownership must be considered in evaluating whether to use the work and how it may be used. If the notice has some legal significance in other countries, defined either by law or by common understanding, I would love to know more about it.

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. And it's an improvement over "Red Hat, Inc.," who is not the copyright owner in many cases.

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 doesn't have to be the same as the copyright notice, it can be anything we want. I think the failure to provide it means only that the licensee is relieved of his or her obligation to give attribution, but I'm happy to be corrected on that.

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

TIFWIW. From a Red Hat legal team perspective this is Richard's purview, not mine, so whatever he says trumps me.

Pam

Pamela S. Chestek
Senior IP Attorney
Red Hat, Inc.
1801 Varsity Drive
Raleigh, NC 27606
919-754-4473
pchestek@redhat.com