Re: Preparation of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r2 (II)
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At 19 Nov 03 18:12:44 GMT,
Osamu Aoki wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 11:20:21AM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
I'm sorry but I missed this mail.
> > I'm not sure there's any reason to believe that there are licensing
> > problems with these fonts.
> > The official reply from Hitachi on this question, as posted at
> > <http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200310/msg00323.html>,
>
> This does not sound like something the real lawyer reviewed.
>
> > seems quite unambiguous: they acknowledge that there are no laws on the
> > books, in Japan or elsewhere, which give them grounds to claim that
> > these fonts infringe their intellectual property rights. Rather, they
> > have referenced previous out-of-court settlements as precedent.
>
> I agree.
Hmm, "we don't accept what is Hitachi said". This is consensus of us?
I agree Hitachi make a mess, but it's not reason to kick them.
> > Unless Japanese law is created in a much different manner than it is
> > in the rest of the world, the results of out-of-court settlements do
> > not constitute legal precedents; they may provide insight into the
> > legal counsel's assessment of their chances of winning a suit, but
> > there are other factors that contribute to such an assessment besides
> > the letter of the law -- most notably, the respective depths of the
> > parties' pockets.
>
> If the party who is using HITACHI font is commercial entity, they may
> likely to pay some money to avoid costly litigation if settlement
> includes no actual financial impact. It does not even say how much they
> gained.
>
> I do not think the Japanese law is created in a much different manner.
The phase of whether legal or illegal was really old issue.
LABO-123 32dot was fully-copied without license agreement from Hitachi.
Watanabe font/xfonts-intl-japanese-big(<1.2.1) is copied from LABO-123
as is.
Kochi font was copied some part from Watanabe.
IMHO Japanese font stands very weak about legal basis, but LABO-123
creates by license violation. Dead-copy should be
removed also. Hitachi/Typebank continue to sell original font.
And kochi font upstream author recommends to use new font strongly.
Do we ignore his intent also?
Goto-san has already uploaded newer packages to woody, but Martin's
list don't include them. But xfonts-intl-japanese-big is included.
> > I don't believe that Debian should ingratiate itself to corporations who
> > throw their weight around to carve out intellectual property without the
> > sanction of the courts. Unless and until Hitachi is taking legal action
> > against our distributors or users in Japan, I think Debian ought to
> > ignore these apparently baseless claims.
Steve, do you want to make distributors/users in Japan to teststone?
I don't agree this idea.
Debian Project has the responsibility about distribution.
If we continue to distribute claimed fonts, we must announce our
consensus and tell how to protect our distributors/users.
> I agree.
>
> One question to ask is "is this useful fonts?" If not, we have totally
> different ground to remove this package based on uselessness :-)
>
> If we ever remeve this package, reason should not be "We must do this
> because HITACH said so". That is dangerous path.
Finally, you are not font maintainer, Osamu.
Maintainers ACCEPTED and AGREED to remove, and has already
reassigned to ftp.debian.org. All of we(especially ftp maintainer)
must do is removing such apackage from ftp.debian.org ASAP, don't we?
Thanks,
- --
Kenshi Muto
kmuto@debian.org
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