CC BY-SA attribution for Fedora docs

[Eric H. Christensen]

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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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