fortunes-atheist copyright again (would be FW: Re: copyright)
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Like I said before (see
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0104/msg01443.html), I intend to
package Wayne Aiken's atheist fortunes available at his site
(http://www4.ncsu.edu/~aiken/). This is the response I've got from him. I'm
waiting for advice (is it enough to include this e-mail response as the
copyright?). Since he states he "encourages everyone to copy it and use it
freely", I'm pretty sure I'm authorized to package it, but IANAL, so I'm asking
you guys (and girls, in case Demonishi is reading this).
Thanks.
[nb. again, if you're subscribed to -legal and not to -devel, please Cc to me]
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Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 00:02:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: aiken@unity.ncsu.edu
To: (Carlos Laviola) <claviola@ajato.com.br>
Subject: Re: copyright
Hi Carlos--
Sorry its taken so long to get back to you, but you caught me right
in the middle of convention/travel season.
>I'm interested in packaging the atheist fortunes available at your web
>site for the Debian GNU/Linux system. We have a policy that requires us
>to include the copyright of all packages that compose our system.
>Therefore, I'd like to ask you to inform me what is the copyright on
>the citations. If you don't have one, I'd like to recommend the GNU
>General Public License (GPL), available at
>http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
I currently, and intentionally, have no copyright over the fortunes
collection. I encourage everyone to copy it and use it freely, and as
far as your system goes, you're most certainly welcome to it.
As for the constituent quotes, my understanding is that they are either
so old that they are public domain, or else the relatively brief quoting
falls under the "fair use" doctrine. Plus, the fact that it has never
been sold nor any money exchanged for it, means that I've never had any
problems with it. Some people have suggested that it be compiled into
a real book, as Chaz Bufe once did with many quotes. I'm not sure that
I could do that with the collection as-is- I probably would need to get
permission for many recent quotes, which is why I've decided to keep it
in freely-distributed electronic form.
I'm not sure if this would impact the way that you would package it in
your system- thanks for the URL on the GNU license, and I'll take a look
at it and see how it can be applied. If it needs a specific copyright
statement to be included, I probably will adopt something like that,
and I'll let you know as soon as I've officially applied whatever it needs
to the file.
Since its a Linux system, you might also want to talk with Ed Gauci
<gauci@good-things.org> who has developed a whole suite of utilities for
working with my particular fortune file, including a "quote of the day"
generator, and several web-based utilities for extracting quotes. You
might want to include those utilities with it, and Ed probably wouldn't
mind packaging it all together.
>
>I'd also like to thank you for the great job - the fortunes you
>collected are a funny, yet insightful overview of atheism.
Thanks! It was originally intended as just a collection of neat
quotes to use in .signature files, but its grown into a lot more than
just that over the years.
- ----
Wayne Aiken slack@ncsu.edu "You can BE what
PO Box 30904 http://www4.ncsu.edu/~aiken/ you WON'T!!"
Raleigh, NC 27622 AIM: slackx42 --"Bob"
(919) 954-5956
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- --
carlos laviola - icq #55799523
$ chown us:us /your_base -R
chown: what you say!!
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