Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Tom Callaway]

On 06/30/2011 02:26 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> I am not sure how that would look like but if informal domain-specific
> licensing has more clearly defined boundaries and would not apply to
> random things like email,  I am in favor of this.  However if we had a
> informal set of policies and someone picks up a spec file from Fedora
> and wants to reuse it outside Fedora,  how would they know what rights
> they have?  My goal in pushing towards explicit licensing is in part to
> make it more obvious what to do in such cases.   Is there a alternative?

Rather than this approach, I think one of the things I believe to be
reasonable would be to add items to the FAQ clarifying which items are
not considered "Contributions" to Fedora. For example, it was never my
intent to state (or imply) that mailing list emails would be assigned a
default license under the FPCA, and to be honest, if that concern had
been raised during the rather lengthy FPCA review process, I would have
added some language to explicitly exclude those sorts of items.
Unfortunately, that time has passed, so clarifications via FAQ will have
to suffice.

The Fedora Privacy Policy says:

  Fedora often makes chat rooms, forums, mailing lists, message boards,
  and/or news groups available to its users. Please remember that any
  information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public
  information.

I do not consider any normal postings to those areas to be covered by
the FPCA, which is also why we do not require FPCA agreement in order to
subscribe to Fedora mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, forums,
and/or news groups.

Attachments in these areas (e.g. patches, art) would fall under the FPCA
once they were in some way used (here I am using the very broad English
definition of use that includes modification, distribution, etc, as
opposed to the limited legal definition) by a Fedora Contributor, who is
taking "responsibility to first obtain
authorization from the copyright holder to Submit the Contribution
under the terms of this FPCA on behalf of, or otherwise with the
permission of, that copyright holder."

(I suppose this would also be true if there was a scenario in which a
posting to one of those areas was Copyrightable and a Fedora Contributor
wanted to "use" it.)

Notably, this logic is really no different from the reasonable best
practice behaviour of dealing with files found on the internet: If the
license is not clear, you cannot assume any permissions, you should seek
clarifications from the copyright holder(s). The FPCA does not magically
supercede this, but rather, it explicitly codifies it.

*****

Another notable case is Bugzilla. Since we share a bugzilla
infrastructure with Red Hat, it is not practical at this time to require
FPCA agreement for Fedora Bugzilla accounts. Thus, bugzilla postings or
attachments are not considered "Contributions" to Fedora.
(Please note that I reserve the right to revisit this if/when Fedora
moves on to its own bugzilla instance.)

However, I would argue that most copyrightable attachments submitted via
Bugzilla are intended to be applied to Fedora packages. Once a Fedora
packager takes an attachment from Bugzilla and uses it in Fedora, it
becomes a Fedora Contribution and falls under the FPCA agreement that
the Fedora Packager agreed to. Again, this means that we expect that the
Fedora Packager is taking "responsibility to first obtain authorization
from the copyright holder to Submit the Contribution under the terms of
this FPCA on behalf of, or otherwise with the permission of, that
copyright holder."

*****

What I think is a reasonable response here would be to add a FAQ entry
containing the "blacklist" of things which are not considered
contributions. The items I have suggested above are the only items that
I can think of which would qualify for such a blacklist (well, maybe
also anything else that we consider "Personal Information" in the
privacy policy, if we're being anal, but I doubt that would qualify as
Copyrightable.)

Nevertheless, I am open to suggestions here.

*****

Lastly, to your specific point about third-parties being unaware of the
default implicit licensing on Fedora Contributions, specifically, spec
files, well, I would argue that those third-parties should be acting
according to the best-practice principle of files with unknown licensing
found on the internet. We can add text to the FPCA page that will make
it more likely that someone doing a web search to find the answer to
that question finds it on that page, or those third parties can simply
ask either legal at fedoraproject.org or the applicable Fedora Package
Maintainer for clarification on the license of the Contribution (in this
case the spec files).

I'm not at all opposed to Fedora Contributors choosing to place explicit
licenses on their Contributions, and I have notably advocated this
whenever it is possible and reasonable to do so, but I do not believe
that mandating such behaviour is beneficial or practical, given the wide
scope of the Fedora Project and its Contributors.

~tom

==
Fedora Project