Unlicensed data is *not distributable*
Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 12:21:08PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>
>> As far as I can see, the SC appleid to everything on the
>> debian CD, and to everything in main.
>
> There is a great deal of data on Debian CDs which has no license
> whatsoever.
This is a problem, because under current copyright law in the US and Europe,
almost everything is copyrighted by default. Exceptions are "facts",
anything containing no originality, and certain other country-specific
things (the text of US laws, for instance). Those are in the public
domain, which is of course considered DFSG-free, because it supplies all
the necessary freedoms (except possibly presence of source, but let's not
get into that now).
Please file a bug against any package containing data which is not clearly
public domain and does not have a valid license; it is not distributable.
I know that's horrible, but that's the law. :-P This is the change from a
'conditional' to an 'unconditional' copyright regime.
> Since, according to the new Social Contract, any arbitrary
> stream of bits which could be called a "component" of Debian is now a
> "work" which requires a license that meets the DFSG, we'd better get to
> work on copyrighting them all...
Trust me, it's already copyrighted, whether you like it or not. :-P This
is not a change.
--
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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