Re: RFS: kernelcheck
la, 2009-06-20 kello 08:56 +0200, David Paleino kirjoitti:
> Is material copyrightable under a nickname, instead of a realname?
Yes, in all jurisdictions I am aware of. It's called a pseudonym and
tends to be explicitly recognized by copyright laws.
The history of literature is full of people writing under pseudonyms,
with their real names unknown (and sometimes hotly debated), at least
part of the time. For example, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot.
(Obviously all those realnames are now known. Else we wouldn't
necessarily even know they were pseudonyms.)
It doesn't even have to sound like a real name, see Jane Austen as "A
Lady".
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonym#Literary_pen_names .)
Debian has traditionally not allowed upload rights (or DD status) to
people whose legal name is not known. The reason is that a lot of power
comes with upload rights, and we want/need some accountability. If you
abuse your power, we need to know whom to blame.
This does not require giving up anonymity to contribute to Debian, but
it limits the things that you can do. For example, patches are certainly
accepted from people whose identity we haven't checked; the uploader,
whom we do know, is responsible for checking that the patch is OK.
As far as checking that it's legal to accept the patch, with regards to
copyright, we tend to take that at face value. If there is a reason to
suspect that something is wrong, we take action, but we do not require
identity checks and copyright assignments or other legal documents to
accept a patch. And that's as it should be.
(We do keep track, via the BTS and debian/changelog especially, where a
patch came from. This is useful in case we later need to track where a
bad patch came from.)
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