On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 10:26:53AM +0530, Viral wrote: > I followed the previous thread from the archives of debian-legal last year > for including fortune packages with quotes from movies etc. > > I understand, that this would be considered as Fair Use, as long as > it is correctly attributed. However because of inclusion in the archives, > CDs can be sold for profit, which makes matters complicated. > > So, if it is included in the non-free section, would it be ok ? The quotes > are included not for the sole purpose of profit, but with accompanying > software and packages. Ugh, people have been making profits indirectly off of fair-use quotations for years. If Hollywood and every book publisher known to man can do it legally, why the hell can't we? I realize that most people are worried about sue-happy corporate America trying to hunt them down wherever they are in the entire world. But c'mon people, at the rate we're going Debian itself will be declared non-free simply because the lot of us have become a bunch of cowards afraid to stand up for our principles. If we are going to not do everything that could possibly somewhere be considered illegal under some bizarre interpretation of the laws of the Pathetic Republic of Greater Stupidity (insert random country here), then we may as well all give up and go back to using proprietary software. First crypto, then mp3, then CSS modules, now the Linux kernel and the fortune databases? Debian's trademark caution seems to be taking a back seat to rampant paranoia taken to the extreme of idiocy. I'm waiting for some highly intelligent idiot to demand that gdb be moved to non-free since it can be used as a circumvention device under the DMCA and similar ridiculous laws popping up in other countries whose leaders appear to have risen from the shallow end of the gene pool. > Basically, can one include fortune-matrix etc. in any part of the debian > archive today, without bothering about legal trouble. If there is legal trouble to be had by distributing fortunes-matrix in main, then there are also problems with every other fortune database Debian has, plus dict-wn, and probably a large collection of other things. Attributed quotations are fair use, it's as simple as that regardless of what the MPAA, RIAA, CBAA, XYZZY, and anyone else for that matter would like you to believe. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Free software developer <KnaraKat> Bite me. * TheOne gets some salt, then proceeds to nibble on KnaraKat a little bit....
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