On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 00:32, Richard Fontana <rfontana@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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.) Don't RH employees retain copyright of their work? I thought I ran into this problem when I was trying to get some text from RH for the Security Guide. > 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")? Are we, the Fedora contributors, hoping that Red Hat will stand up for us if there is ever a problem with copyright infringement? Is this even a valid assumption? As we've seen with the recent Righthaven cases, if you don't own the copyright then you can't sue for infringement. I don't know how this would work with Fedora documentation. > 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.) Attribution is a problem that I wrote about on the list not too long ago.[0] In my opinion we aren't doing attribution correctly. Unfortunately CC-BY-SA doesn't provide any specific requirement on *how* to attribute the work (thanks to Spot for pointing that out). We need to make a standard for doing this in Fedora and perhaps write a SOP for others that want to use Fedora documentation on how we want attribution to be done. > 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. I think we should seriously visit the entire copyright and licensing issues and try to address them. At this point I think attribution is a problem and, from your thoughts, the licensing wording isn't correctly implemented. > Thanks for bringing this up. [0] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/2011-June/013440.html --Eric -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/docs
