Hi, 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. If I remember correctly, this is implemented via the Fedora Publican brand package. This form of copyright notice is found elsewhere in the Fedora universe, as in the footer of fp.o web pages. I recognize the convenience of a universal legal notice for purposes of automating generation of documentation, but there is something about it that bothers me. Consider two examples: the Fedora 14 Amateur Radio Guide and the Fedora 15 Musician's Guide. From what I can tell, the actual authors of these documents are not, and were not at time of authorship, Red Hat employees. (Moreover, it is not necessarily the case, in any given situation, that Red Hat would be copyright holder of all or some of the text even if they had been Red Hat employees, but for simplicity let's ignore that issue.) Now, the copyright notice is correct nonetheless because Red Hat holds copyright on the Fedora logo image, and, as I recall, all documentation includes some standard language (like the typographical conventions section) over which, let us assume, Red Hat has some copyright interest. Nevertheless, why should a document that was actually written exclusively by non-Red-Hat employees use "Copyright Red Hat, Inc. and others" (what a friend of mine has called a "Gilligan's Island copyright" after the original Gilligan's Island theme song which famously referred to the important characters of the Professor and Mary Ann as "and the rest")? I don't think the Red Hat copyright ownership of the Fedora logo image justifies the Gilligan's Island copyright notice, as in fact the CC BY-SA license notice is designed (and perhaps should be improved in this regard, even though it ought to be obvious) to make clear that the logo image itself isn't being licensed under CC BY-SA. So if anything it is the intention for the copyright notice *not* to refer to the logo. (And, if you want a copyright notice because of the logo, have a special line saying "Logo copyright <year> Red Hat, Inc.") And while Red Hat might hold copyright on some small standard portions of the text, the substantial part of what is creative and expressive in the examples I gave were written by people unaffiliated with Red Hat. So, in the case of at least that subset of Fedora documentation that is written by those who aren't Red Hat employees (but perhaps, er, the rest too), what purpose is the Gilligan's Island copyright notice serving? It doesn't provide the public notice of actual substantial copyright ownership in at least some cases. It doesn't provide attribution to the actual human authors. To me, all it really does is communicate the following: 1) Red Hat has an intimate connection to the Fedora Project. 2) Red Hat is "first among equals" when it comes to attribution for Fedora project documentation; non-Red-Hat-associated contributors to Fedora documentation merit only second-class status. I submit that 1) is already rather obvious to the world and is, if anything, problematically exaggerated in the public mind. I submit that 2) is an inappropriate use of a copyright notice even if the policy were legitimate. Copyright notices aren't supposed to be used for attribution - I recognize that in free software they often do serve that purpose - but if they *are* used for attribution, attribution ought to be given to the human authors. Or to the Fedora Project as collaborative thing. (A nice thing about CC licenses is that they decouple attribution from copyright ownership, as in fact you can see in the default documentation legal notice which states that attribution is to be given to the Fedora Project -- not Red Hat.) I submit further that it serves no valid purpose to overemphasize the degree to which Red Hat is the copyright holder of Fedora documentation anyway. Fedora contributors do not assign copyright to Red Hat. If you want to give credit to Red Hat, or overemphasize the intimacy of the Fedora/Red Hat relationship, do so in some other way: have a "The Fedora Project is sponsored by Red Hat" line or something like that (though I don't see the point of that either, and if we really cared about that I assume we would have had a requirement to give attribution to Red Hat rather than the Fedora Project). It may be that the only practical alternative is not to have a copyright notice at all. That is by no means beyond consideration, given that copyright notices have rather limited significance anyway. In the specific examples I noted above, I would say that what little legal value copyright notices have is not present at all. This could well be true of other cases. So I guess I'm interested in knowing whether there is a strong desire (particularly among those on this list who are not Red Hat employees yet who have contributed to Fedora documentation) to maintain the tradition of the Gilligan's Island copyright notice, and whether alternatives are feasible and preferable. The Musician's Guide shows that one can prominently credit the principal human author of the document at the beginning. The Amateur Radio Guide shows that one can do the same thing but with "The Fedora Documentation Project" as the author. If no such strong desire exists, it is my desire to recommend changes that will eliminate the use of the Gilligan's Island copyright notice in Fedora documentation. - Richard -- Richard E. Fontana Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel Red Hat, Inc. -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/docs
