Re: free licensing of TEI Guidelines
On Feb 11, 2004, at 14:44, Syd Bauman wrote:
While this would meet the goals articulated above, it appears that
Debian has some potentially serious objections to the GFDL[1]. So the
question arises, how can we create a copyleft license that is
sufficiently free for Debian, but at the same time prevents others
from claiming TEI-conformance for texts that are not?
Stop. You don't want to use copyright law to do this! Copyright law
deals with copying, distributing and deriving from works. Nothing you
can do with copyright law can stop me from writing my own document and
claiming it as TEI conforming.
Go look up trademark law. That's what you want. If I state that
something has the endorsement of the TEI Consortium when it doesn't, I
have violated the Lanham(?) Act [sorry, offline, can't check the name].
I forget which title of US code it is, but you'll be able to find it
easily --- look for trademarks.
If you want to register it, I believe you want a certification mark.
You can put something like this in the license:
This document is an official standard of the TEI Consortium.
If you modify it, you must make it clear that you have done
so and that the TEI Consortium does not endorse the result.
Or, you could just go look at the GPL, which already essentially has
that.
PS: Apologies if I've just made up the name 'Lanham Act', or if it
turns out to concern something entirely different, like breeding
Martians in your pool on Tuesdays under a blue moon (original
definition).
a) a copyleft notice that requires those who modify the Guidelines to
retain unmodified or delete in its entirety the section that
defines TEI conformance, or
Depends on what's in that section, methinks. If upon modification you
need to delete the endorsement of the TEI Consortium, that's fine. If
it's a huge section, then I think the document would only be free once
its deleted.
b) a copyleft notice that requires that modified versions of the
Guidelines describe documents with a different root element name
(perhaps, similar to "<?xml", reserving any string that matches
"^[Tt][Ee][Ii]") and to not use the TEI namespace.
You can't actually enforce that with copyright law, methinks. Someone
could always write their own document to describe their extensions.
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