On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 00:32, Richard Fontana <rfontana(a)redhat.com> wrote:
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.)
Don't RH employees retain copyright of their work? I thought I ran
into this problem when I was trying to get some text from RH for the
Security Guide.
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")?
Are we, the Fedora contributors, hoping that Red Hat will stand up for
us if there is ever a problem with copyright infringement? Is this
even a valid assumption? As we've seen with the recent Righthaven
cases, if you don't own the copyright then you can't sue for
infringement. I don't know how this would work with Fedora
documentation.
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.)
Attribution is a problem that I wrote about on the list not too long
ago.[0] In my opinion we aren't doing attribution correctly.
Unfortunately CC-BY-SA doesn't provide any specific requirement on
*how* to attribute the work (thanks to Spot for pointing that out).
We need to make a standard for doing this in Fedora and perhaps write
a SOP for others that want to use Fedora documentation on how we want
attribution to be done.
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.
I think we should seriously visit the entire copyright and licensing
issues and try to address them. At this point I think attribution is
a problem and, from your thoughts, the licensing wording isn't
correctly implemented.
Thanks for bringing this up.
[0]
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/2011-June/013440.html
--Eric