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. > 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.) > 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). 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. 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. - RF -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/docs
