Proposal: end Gilligan's Island copyright notices in Fedora docs

[Pamela Chestek]

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 at redhat.com

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