-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sun, Oct 02, 2011 at 09:57:45PM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote: > 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). Does it have to be a legal entity? I liked "Fedora Documentation Team" or "Fedora Project Contributors" but neither of those are legal entities. How does one prove ownership of the copyright in the case of a group project like this? > > 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. 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? > > 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. 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. As far as listing the URL, the source may not be from the web. I know the Release Notes are packaged and shipped with all copies of Fedora and there is always the possibility that someone else would want that as well. Printed copies from source? > > 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? Maybe. Membership isn't rigid and one might contribute to documentation from another Project (like the Cloud folks helping with the Cloud Guide). > > * Is attribution to anything other than the listed authors desired at > all? As I commented above, I feel like the list of authors isn't complete on many guides. The list may also grow to be quite long. We also run into a possible problem with attribution for translators. > > * 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)? You are assuming that the user is getting the document from the docs.fp.o webpage. They may get a document from the Fedora release media or from the git repository (source). Come to think of it, we aren't actually putting ownership information in our source documents. That could become problematic if source files got out into the wild. > > Thanks, > > Richard E. Fontana > Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel > Red Hat, Inc. 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). At some point in the recent past we talked about creating a wiki page for every document published by Fedora that would contain a complete list of contributors. This fixes several round-robin issues with providing attribution to translators for their work and would make a cleaner published product (copyright owners listed at http://fp.o/wiki/...). I believe it is important to get a procedure for providing attribution to those that take time to write the bits that go into our guides. I, personally, will be auditing the guides I have generally been working on but we should make sure that others are complete as well (the Release Notes comes to mind). - --Eric -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJOiSMxAAoJEIB2q94CS7PRDI4P/Rly1SYDm3g3PrSyInYom7Z4 vie65t0WqiapYkRPF5YsCKsygurNvpKMH0Zq4FrhMMT1ZvWeDE0kvTmcL14u1Yrc MJvWHDeTAdLrlBpWmNeK1lwcONh7YzN8BEzuqBTD18Zpv2s9VkOhsXejMzoEUfhn Li/9s/vmC3OstfX6RZV46YikW0uICz/9Qte2UddfPWSbh/TalN877CMKV/8o94+2 GO9ZsVhhSos0Sd26PSrXUj0vjBv5c+3K/eFcLH0KwOgqsL79sg1kFWS3uCT7gRQt Iu4LmnBgGJOOa634KxaO7MUn/1qSbUtTG6VsHwp2h65yCMgItmiq9L858zUoCgSO XaDlaTzNnbCfvjAH7vKPtOzO4DgnD8q3Lu9s36y4xgrDcv4gkjqS0FU2pc7dyCTH Ygz4Ju9Sn1EoxB9ZawEnKXC91AkoAIWdN8vnFI43u0af5PbeX3vhP+Y0iiYJbXZX YBU+RFaq6C4VO3iMgGQbghYAOg+0dcNSEJaWZB86KRCa81t244bqXtG02Uzpx37R aqu40wC0cAnYaOFH1iI0k1LiR97KhPOQf8raE60za1n2ia/NPn+LLDhlBXEbgCQm i6xudbMA8b1AIDe5lDKfKTX2GmVAkzEOE075oormhBeKX8ro8L1YHdYVivL8cH0q PwHLNM5uQhXYvI7qUPiB =w+jk -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/docs
