8:57 p.m.
Hi,
The standard license for Fedora documentation today is CC BY-SA 3.0
Unported (with a waiver of its ill-drafted moral rights clause). The
"BY" part of the license shorthand name of course refers to the common
feature of CC licenses providing for attribution to the author or some
other designated entity.
Currently the boilerplate legal notice handles attribution by saying:
The original authors of this document, and Red Hat, designate the
Fedora Project as the "Attribution Party" for purposes of
CC-BY-SA. In accordance with CC-BY-SA, if you distribute this
document or an adaptation of it, you must provide the URL for the
original version.
The first sentence there is somewhat cryptic for someone who hasn't
read the so-called "Legal Code" of CC BY-SA 3.0. Basically section
4(c) says that a distributor of the original or a derivative work must
(1) preserve copyright notices and (2) provide the name of the
"Original Author" (as defined, for a Fedora manual I'd say this would
be any named human authors or any substitute like "Fedora
Documentation Team" in the Installation Guide).
In addition or alternatively, the "Original Author and/or Licensor"
can designate an "Attribution Party", in which case the distributor
must provide the name of that Attribution Party. So we've been saying
"the Fedora Project" is that Attribution Party. Note also that Red Hat
appears in this legal text as *the* "Licensor" for what are now
basically obsolete reasons as a result of changes in the
recently-implemented Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. I *think*
that was one of the reasons for using the "Attribution Party" idea.
CC BY-SA 3.0 goes on to require the distributor to provide the
original title of the work and "to the extent reasonably practicable,
the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the
Work". There's even more detail, but that's the gist of it. That
requirement about the "URI" is the explanation for the second sentence
of the Fedora docs legal notice excerpt I quoted above.
We are looking at revising the legal notice, which provides an
opportunity to improve the attribution part. If I'm not mistaken,
people on the docs team have independently given some thought recently
to the issue of desired attribution. My current suggestion is to
replace the above excerpt with:
Required attribution under CC BY-SA shall include the names of all
listed authors of this document; the name of the Fedora Project
together with the URL <http://fedoraproject.org/>; and the URL for
the original version of this document.
Does anyone have any suggestions for improvements on that? For
example:
* Would it make more sense to speak of "the Fedora Documentation
Project" and the URL <http://docs.fedoraproject.org/> (at which that
term is used) rather than the more general reference to Fedora?
* Is attribution to anything other than the listed authors desired at
all?
* Is it reasonable at all to include the specific URL of the original
web version of the document as we've been doing (I don't know how
permanent these are expected to be)?
Thanks,
Richard E. Fontana
Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel
Red Hat, Inc.
9:04 p.m.
On Sun, Oct 02, 2011 at 09:57:45PM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
My current suggestion is to
replace the above excerpt with:
Required attribution under CC BY-SA shall include the names of all
listed authors of this document; the name of the Fedora Project
together with the URL <http://fedoraproject.org/>; and the URL for
the original version of this document.
Sorry, that should have been
Required attribution under CC BY-SA shall include the names of all
listed authors of this document; the original title of this
document; the name of the Fedora Project together with the URL
<http://fedoraproject.org/>; and the URL for the original version of
this document.
- RF
6:09 p.m.
With documentation, GNOME sometimes acts as a downstream project to the
distros. So I'd like to provide the perspective of somebody who might
actually be reusing the content.
On Sun, 2011-10-02 at 22:04 -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
Required attribution under CC BY-SA shall include the names of all
listed authors of this document; the original title of this
document; the name of the Fedora Project together with the URL
<http://fedoraproject.org/>; and the URL for the original version of
this document.
The original title and Fedora advertisement are pretty burdensome,
and are reminiscent of the kinds of documentation licenses we've
been trying to get away from. They seem OK when publishing books,
but they get really tedious when you start piecing together topics
from a dozen different sources.
For comparison, here's Wikipedia's requirement:
To re-distribute text on Wikipedia in any form, provide credit to the
authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to
the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or
URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible,
which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the
authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website,
or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to
exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)
--
Shaun
9:51 p.m.
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Hash: SHA1
On Sun, Oct 02, 2011 at 09:57:45PM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
Hi,
The standard license for Fedora documentation today is CC BY-SA 3.0
Unported (with a waiver of its ill-drafted moral rights clause). The
"BY" part of the license shorthand name of course refers to the common
feature of CC licenses providing for attribution to the author or some
other designated entity.
Currently the boilerplate legal notice handles attribution by saying:
The original authors of this document, and Red Hat, designate the
Fedora Project as the "Attribution Party" for purposes of
CC-BY-SA. In accordance with CC-BY-SA, if you distribute this
document or an adaptation of it, you must provide the URL for the
original version.
The first sentence there is somewhat cryptic for someone who hasn't
read the so-called "Legal Code" of CC BY-SA 3.0. Basically section
4(c) says that a distributor of the original or a derivative work must
(1) preserve copyright notices and (2) provide the name of the
"Original Author" (as defined, for a Fedora manual I'd say this would
be any named human authors or any substitute like "Fedora
Documentation Team" in the Installation Guide).
Does it have to be a legal entity? I liked "Fedora Documentation Team" or
"Fedora Project Contributors" but neither of those are legal entities. How does
one prove ownership of the copyright in the case of a group project like this?
In addition or alternatively, the "Original Author and/or Licensor"
can designate an "Attribution Party", in which case the distributor
must provide the name of that Attribution Party. So we've been saying
"the Fedora Project" is that Attribution Party. Note also that Red Hat
appears in this legal text as *the* "Licensor" for what are now
basically obsolete reasons as a result of changes in the
recently-implemented Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. I *think*
that was one of the reasons for using the "Attribution Party" idea.
I'm not sure Red Hat can hold the copyright to this work. If they can't/don't
then I believe that Red Hat wouldn't be able to help us if there was infringement (see
Righthaven). If we (the creators of the work) needed to enforce the license would we be
on our own for legal representation?
CC BY-SA 3.0 goes on to require the distributor to provide the
original title of the work and "to the extent reasonably practicable,
the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the
Work". There's even more detail, but that's the gist of it. That
requirement about the "URI" is the explanation for the second sentence
of the Fedora docs legal notice excerpt I quoted above.
We are looking at revising the legal notice, which provides an
opportunity to improve the attribution part. If I'm not mistaken,
people on the docs team have independently given some thought recently
to the issue of desired attribution. My current suggestion is to
replace the above excerpt with:
Required attribution under CC BY-SA shall include the names of all
listed authors of this document; the name of the Fedora Project
together with the URL <http://fedoraproject.org/>; and the URL for
the original version of this document.
I would say that the author list is not necessarily a complete listing of copyright
holders. That is one thing that needs to be changed (more on that below). I also wonder
if the list would be too long for easy attribution.
As far as listing the URL, the source may not be from the web. I know the Release Notes
are packaged and shipped with all copies of Fedora and there is always the possibility
that someone else would want that as well. Printed copies from source?
Does anyone have any suggestions for improvements on that? For
example:
* Would it make more sense to speak of "the Fedora Documentation
Project" and the URL <http://docs.fedoraproject.org/> (at which that
term is used) rather than the more general reference to Fedora?
Maybe. Membership isn't rigid and one might contribute to documentation from another
Project (like the Cloud folks helping with the Cloud Guide).
* Is attribution to anything other than the listed authors desired at
all?
As I commented above, I feel like the list of authors isn't complete on many guides.
The list may also grow to be quite long. We also run into a possible problem with
attribution for translators.
* Is it reasonable at all to include the specific URL of the original
web version of the document as we've been doing (I don't know how
permanent these are expected to be)?
You are assuming that the user is getting the document from the docs.fp.o webpage. They
may get a document from the Fedora release media or from the git repository (source).
Come to think of it, we aren't actually putting ownership information in our source
documents. That could become problematic if source files got out into the wild.
Thanks,
Richard E. Fontana
Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel
Red Hat, Inc.
Thanks, Richard, for re-visiting this. Unfortunately I feel as if we haven't been
doing attribution to the best of our abilities (my opinion) and while we leave a pretty
good breadcrumb trail (git commit logs, wiki logs, etc) making it easy to determine who
owns the copyright for all the bits in our group project is hidden, at best. The newer
guides might be in better shape but the older ones and the ones with text taken from the
wiki are woefully inadequate (speaking as someone who has personally failed in this
venture with the Accessibility Guide, the Security Guide, and anything else that was
resurrected from the the cvs grave).
At some point in the recent past we talked about creating a wiki page for every document
published by Fedora that would contain a complete list of contributors. This fixes
several round-robin issues with providing attribution to translators for their work and
would make a cleaner published product (copyright owners listed at http://fp.o/wiki/...).
I believe it is important to get a procedure for providing attribution to those that take
time to write the bits that go into our guides. I, personally, will be auditing the
guides I have generally been working on but we should make sure that others are complete
as well (the Release Notes comes to mind).
- --Eric
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11:20 p.m.
On Sun, Oct 02, 2011 at 10:51:29PM -0400, Eric H. Christensen wrote:
> (1) preserve copyright notices and (2) provide the name of the
> "Original Author" (as defined, for a Fedora manual I'd say this would
> be any named human authors or any substitute like "Fedora
> Documentation Team" in the Installation Guide).
Does it have to be a legal entity?
No, for example "Fedora Documentation Team" could be an "Original
Author" in the sense meant in CC BY-SA 3.0, in my opinion.
I'm not sure Red Hat can hold the copyright to this work. If
they
can't/don't then I believe that Red Hat wouldn't be able to help us
if there was infringement (see Righthaven). If we (the creators of
the work) needed to enforce the license would we be on our own for
legal representation?
Certainly: this is a direct consequence of the fact that contributors
to Fedora are not required to assign copyright to Red Hat, or any
other entity. (Moreover, individuals contributing to projects that do
require copyright assignment cannot, of course, rely on the copyright
holder enforcing the license that it grants.)
I would say that the author list is not necessarily a complete
listing of copyright holders. That is one thing that needs to be
changed (more on that below). I also wonder if the list would be
too long for easy attribution.
Yes, I recall we discussed this back when I raised the Gilligan's
Island issue. Note that any particular listed author isn't necessarily
a copyright holder. (But CC BY-SA seems to take that into account.)
Anyway, my thinking was that where particular Fedora manuals *do* list
authors, it seems generally to be a small list. If someone contributed
to a document and is bothered by the potential failure to provide
attribution, I suppose they could request that their name be added to
the list of authors.
Thanks, Richard, for re-visiting this. Unfortunately I feel as if
we haven't been doing attribution to the best of our abilities (my
opinion) and while we leave a pretty good breadcrumb trail (git
commit logs, wiki logs, etc) making it easy to determine who owns
the copyright for all the bits in our group project is hidden, at
best. The newer guides might be in better shape but the older ones
and the ones with text taken from the wiki are woefully inadequate
(speaking as someone who has personally failed in this venture with
the Accessibility Guide, the Security Guide, and anything else that
was resurrected from the the cvs grave).
Ah, I think we may be talking about two slightly different things. You
seem to be concerned with the problem of whether the Fedora
documentation team is giving sufficient credit to those who contribute
to a given document. I am talking about what downstream redistributors
(or modifiers-distributors) should be required to do with what they
get from the Fedora Project (as guided by the legal notice).
But those are not completely unrelated issues, because, at least under
the new FPCA regime, any contributor to Fedora documentation is
potentially a CC BY-SA licensor. Thus one can reasonably say that the
Fedora documentation team has responsibilities to its own
contributors.
My basic current view on this is that if an author wants credit, the
author has the responsibility to ensure that he or she is
visible. This isn't limited to Creative Commons licenses or content
licensing; I apply a similar interpretation to the GPL's "appropriate
copyright notice" requirement. Therefore once a document is actually
released by the Fedora docs team, it is reasonable for everyone else
to assume its list of authors is complete or precise enough for
purposes of attribution. If the Fedora docs team thinks the level of
precision in identifying authors/contributors is not high enough it
can decide on how to remedy that.
I also note the following clause in the FPCA:
You consent to having Fedora provide reasonable notice of Your
licensing of Your Contribution under the Current Default License
(and, if applicable, a Later Default License) in a manner determined
by Fedora.
I was thinking more of the MIT License, the default "code" license,
when I wrote that, but it applies to CC BY-SA as the default content
license too. I see this as giving the Fedora Project some reasonable
leeway in how it deals with the issue of crediting contributors.
- RF
10:07 a.m.
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Hash: SHA1
On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 12:20:11AM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
On Sun, Oct 02, 2011 at 10:51:29PM -0400, Eric H. Christensen wrote:
> > (1) preserve copyright notices and (2) provide the name of the
> > "Original Author" (as defined, for a Fedora manual I'd say this
would
> > be any named human authors or any substitute like "Fedora
> > Documentation Team" in the Installation Guide).
>
> Does it have to be a legal entity?
No, for example "Fedora Documentation Team" could be an "Original
Author" in the sense meant in CC BY-SA 3.0, in my opinion.
Okay, this makes sense.
> I'm not sure Red Hat can hold the copyright to this work. If they
> can't/don't then I believe that Red Hat wouldn't be able to help us
> if there was infringement (see Righthaven). If we (the creators of
> the work) needed to enforce the license would we be on our own for
> legal representation?
Certainly: this is a direct consequence of the fact that contributors
to Fedora are not required to assign copyright to Red Hat, or any
other entity. (Moreover, individuals contributing to projects that do
require copyright assignment cannot, of course, rely on the copyright
holder enforcing the license that it grants.)
So how do we go about enforcing the license?
> I would say that the author list is not necessarily a complete
> listing of copyright holders. That is one thing that needs to be
> changed (more on that below). I also wonder if the list would be
> too long for easy attribution.
Yes, I recall we discussed this back when I raised the Gilligan's
Island issue. Note that any particular listed author isn't necessarily
a copyright holder. (But CC BY-SA seems to take that into account.)
Anyway, my thinking was that where particular Fedora manuals *do* list
authors, it seems generally to be a small list. If someone contributed
to a document and is bothered by the potential failure to provide
attribution, I suppose they could request that their name be added to
the list of authors.
> Thanks, Richard, for re-visiting this. Unfortunately I feel as if
> we haven't been doing attribution to the best of our abilities (my
> opinion) and while we leave a pretty good breadcrumb trail (git
> commit logs, wiki logs, etc) making it easy to determine who owns
> the copyright for all the bits in our group project is hidden, at
> best. The newer guides might be in better shape but the older ones
> and the ones with text taken from the wiki are woefully inadequate
> (speaking as someone who has personally failed in this venture with
> the Accessibility Guide, the Security Guide, and anything else that
> was resurrected from the the cvs grave).
Ah, I think we may be talking about two slightly different things. You
seem to be concerned with the problem of whether the Fedora
documentation team is giving sufficient credit to those who contribute
to a given document. I am talking about what downstream redistributors
(or modifiers-distributors) should be required to do with what they
get from the Fedora Project (as guided by the legal notice).
Here is a problem. If we aren't providing attribution then we aren't following
the CC BY-SA license. If we aren't providing attribution then how can others provide
appropriate attribution?
But those are not completely unrelated issues, because, at least under
the new FPCA regime, any contributor to Fedora documentation is
potentially a CC BY-SA licensor. Thus one can reasonably say that the
Fedora documentation team has responsibilities to its own
contributors.
Exactly.
My basic current view on this is that if an author wants credit, the
author has the responsibility to ensure that he or she is
visible. This isn't limited to Creative Commons licenses or content
licensing; I apply a similar interpretation to the GPL's "appropriate
copyright notice" requirement. Therefore once a document is actually
released by the Fedora docs team, it is reasonable for everyone else
to assume its list of authors is complete or precise enough for
purposes of attribution. If the Fedora docs team thinks the level of
precision in identifying authors/contributors is not high enough it
can decide on how to remedy that.
I also note the following clause in the FPCA:
You consent to having Fedora provide reasonable notice of Your
licensing of Your Contribution under the Current Default License
(and, if applicable, a Later Default License) in a manner determined
by Fedora.
I was thinking more of the MIT License, the default "code" license,
when I wrote that, but it applies to CC BY-SA as the default content
license too. I see this as giving the Fedora Project some reasonable
leeway in how it deals with the issue of crediting contributors.
Maybe but only if we decide to change the license. If we are saying that we are CC BY-SA
then we have to meet those requirements until such time when we officially change the
license.
- RF
- --Eric
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4588
days inactive
4588
days old
5 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
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Eric Christensen -
Richard Fontana -
Shaun McCance