Re: CCPL-by
Joe Buck <Joe.Buck@synopsys.COM> writes:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 07:30:56PM -0500, Jeremy Hankins wrote:
>> In my personal opinion, the "moral rights" idea is very disturbing.
>> I know it has its defenders, ...
>
> The issue is not whether it's right or wrong. It's more fundamental
> than that. The DFSG were originally designed for software; if they
> are to be extended to apply to works that are mainly about expression
> rather than function, you risk bumping up against the law. Someone
> in, say, France, may not legally be able to grant the permissions that
> you are demanding.
But how is this any different from export controls, for example? Or
silly patents that we can't predict and have no control over? Yes,
there are many reasons other than the license for a work being non-free,
and edgy, unpleasant things like export controls that we can mostly work
around. This isn't news, and as it happens it's in the FAQ[1].
But there is a big differences between, for example, a GPL work under a
droit d'author regime and a license with a clause like the CC-by
license.
The CC-by license requires that I purge an original author's name from
my (derivative) work simply on his say-so. No justification necessary.
My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong, of course) is that droit
d'author has a number of appropriate reasons the author may use to
justify such a request, and that such a claim will ultimately be decided
in court (i.e., does the modification *really* violate the original
author's principles?).
> Now, the French contributor can sneak something past debian-legal by
> writing a license text that appears to grant permissions that the
> contributor has no power to grant. Is that what you want?
I suspect that if and when a French (or whatever else) contributor goes
after a work on droit d'author grounds (perhaps because his code is used
for freenet, which he doesn't support) we'll deal with that on a
case-by-case basis, much as we do with patents now. Hopefully releasing
code under a free license is enough of a statement on the author's goals
that this wouldn't be too much of a problem, but it's not something
Debian would likely fight anyone on anyway.
[1] Question 4: http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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