On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 07:02:55PM -0500, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Branden Robinson wrote: > > Publicity rights are not within the scope of copyright law. The > > right to use people's names or likenesses to promote things is not > > assumed to attach to copyright licenses in the first place. > > I'd hope so, but you never know these days.[1] Well, if we're going to play cynic... "These days", you're best off assuming that a copyright license doesn't even grant you the rights it says it does, thanks to recent legislation. It would be very unreasonable in the current climate to assume that you had rights not even hinted at in the license document. > Regardless, their idea is that if you then used their names, it gives > their lawyers an extra stick to beat you with, beyond just using the > standard slander/libel laws. [Plus, they get to bring in the FBI to > track you down.] License documents that succumb excessively to lawyer's desires to have many "sticks" with which to "beat" the licensee should be rejected as non-DFSG-free, because they don't promote freedom. Licenses that terrorize the licensee and discourage him or her from exercising the rights he or she should be able to expect from a Free Software license are not the sort of thing people should need to worry about coming from Debian main. -- G. Branden Robinson | Convictions are more dangerous Debian GNU/Linux | enemies of truth than lies. branden@debian.org | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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