Legal update

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 19:53 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 13:56 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >> Bill Nottingham wrote:
> >>> Rahul Sundaram (sundaram at fedoraproject.org) said: 
> >>>>> Linking to "third party repositories": Legal says that we can link, from
> >>>>> the Fedora website, to third party repositories, so long as no one has
> >>>>> made a critical assessment to determine that a patent or patents cover
> >>>>> the technology in question and no party has actually asserted their
> >>>>> patents against the technology, we should be okay. Once we are on notice
> >>>>> of a claim of infringement or are aware of a competent assessment that
> >>>>> concludes infringement is likely, we would need to take the link down or
> >>>>> run a serious risk of facing a claim for inducing infringement.  Merely
> >>>>> linking would be highly unlikely to subject us to a claim of direct
> >>>>> infringement. I asked about MP3, and it was stated that unless we are
> >>>>> specifically aware of the MP3 patent holders asserting a claim against
> >>>>> the technology, we are still okay.
> >>>> So the real question now that Red Hat Legal is ok with it is whether we in 
> >>>> the Fedora Project should be doing it?
> >>>>
> >>>> I think we should link to RPM Fusion (the free part) in the future if and 
> >>>> when it's up and running from codeina
> >>> ... in what way? The codeina codec list is included in the packaging.
> >> In the initial dialog box perhaps? I don't know what would be the most 
> >> appropriate thing to do.
> > 
> > You cannot link to livna/RPM Fusion from within a package, RH Legal was
> > very clear on that. You can link to the Fedoraproject.org page that
> > links to it, but not directly to it.
> 
> I had the impression that it was about linking to the repository package 
> directly instead of just the website? If even linking to the website 
> itself from a dialog box in codeina is not ok with Red Hat Legal, we 
> could either update http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CodecBuddy or in the 
> second dialog where it lists the Fluendo codecs, we could introduce a 
> new link that says "click here for free alternatives" or something 
> similar. Is that ok?

The semantics of the how are not really my call, as long as you follow
these two rules:

1. The only place we can link to 3rd party repositories is from
fedoraproject.org, under the terms that I originally described.

2. We cannot directly link to 3rd party repositories from any Fedora
package.

~spot