CC BY-SA attribution for Fedora docs

[Richard Fontana]

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.