Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the FDL
Georg said:
>Yes. But that is a question of Copyright law, not license.
>
>Given that a document is under a license that permits modification,
>any redistributor could add anything and then say that removing it
>would hurt his or her moral rights.
First of all, 'moral rights' don't exist in the US. In the UK, and all the
Commonwealth countries, I believe they are limited to the right to be
identified as the author. (All other similar rights are protected by libel &
slander law, anti-fraud law, etc., which operate quite differently and really
have no place in a copyright licence.) So your theory here is legally
invalid in, essentially, the entire English-speaking world.
Second, even in other countries, I assume that moral rights are limited to
something reasonable. A redistributor can *claim* that removing it would
hurt his moral rights, but it doesn't make it *true*. He could also *claim*
that removing it constitutes libel, slander, fraud, extortion, and theft, but
it's still not *true*.
I don't think that defending against the possibility of a quirk of Italian or
French law being abused by an irresponsible person is worth the very real
damage being done by 'invariant sections'.
>Any license trying to allow modification/removal of such sections
>would run a higher risk of being ruled invalid as a whole because
>these are inalienable rights.
As above, this is nonsense in most of the world.
>So by having no possibility for invariant sections in a documentation
>license, all you do is increase the possibility that it will one day
>be ruled to be invalid as a whole.
FUD, pure FUD. Has anything close to this ever *happened*? No.
Please listen to us. The GFDL is causing real damage to the cause of free
documentation for free software.
And don't forget that it's GPL-incompatible. (*Both ways* in fact. GPLed
code cannot be put into a GFDLed document, except through the 'fair use'
provisions of copyright law, which get narrower every day. Which would be a
serious flaw even if the GFDL was a free licence, which it's not.)
--Nathanael Nerode
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