Re: Bug#56166: base-files: copyright in motd is outdated (fwd)

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Ronald L.Chichester wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, you wrote:
> > In any event, U.S. law at least acknowledges the concept of a
> > "collection copyright."  To cite another example: M$ claims copyright
> > for Windows, even though significant parts of Windows are copyrighted
> > at least in part by others (Intel [Defrag], UC-Berkeley [TCP/IP
> > networking commands], etc.)  So I think we are well within our rights
> > to claim copyright over our work, which is in assembling and
> > maintaining the distribution as a whole.
> > 
> 
> Chris is right.  Specifically, Section 102 of the U.S. Copyright act defines a
> compilation as:
> 
> "...a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or
> of data that is selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the
> resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship..."

Well, my question is more a "do we really want to claim ownership of it?"
than a "do we really have the right to copyright Debian as a whole?".

I remember that the Simtel archives were reorganized some time ago so that
all the free software (including djgpp and the GNU software) was put out
of the "collection" (of which Simtel claimed a "compilation copyright").
[ Maybe this was done upon RMS request, I don't know ].

Is claming ownership of Debian as a whole within the spirit of the free
software world?

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