Re: GNU FDL 1.2 draft comment summary posted, and RFD
Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> wrote:
> 1) We don't want to tell Professor Smith that he's in violation because
> he printed out a DFCL-licensed document, but the font in his laser
> printer is proprietary to, say, Hewlett-Packard (or Adobe). He then
> makes a dozen copies for his grad students and hands them out. This
> should be legitimate.
This example suggests that we should add a "small scale" exemption in.
> 2) We don't want a music webcaster to take DFCL-licensed piece of music
> out of "the commons" because he runs the music stream through some sort
> of highly proprietary equalization/compression process before
> transmitting it. Such a transformation might not be reversible. If
> this is the most popular form of dissemination for that piece of music,
> we have to be sure that this broadcaster is obligated to make the
> original piece of music, as licensed under the DFCL, available.
Are you thinking of MP3's here? You could make the same argument
about software. What about running the source through a highly
proprietary compiler (such as Java) before transmitting? It is a very
popular way of disseminating small programs.
Allowing proprietary transforms opens up a can of worms. There are
too many ways that a work can be "modified" in a transform, and
defining the differences in a legally coherent way is probably
impossible.
> > I'm with Branden here. If it's distributed to that many folks, it should
> > be made electronically available. I hope that photocopies are used mostly
> > because the original isn't available electronically, which won't be a
> > problem for things under this license.
>
> Well...there's what easy for professors at big western universities, and
> there's what's easy for Peace Corps volunteers in Africa (they are often
> assigned to schoolteaching duties, especially in the English-speaking
> countries).
>
> It's fine to mandate that the professor supply a URL to the source-form
> of the document when we're talking about Carnegie-Mellon. It's not so
> fine to mandate that when we're talking about a school that doesn't even
> have a name in Ghana.
If we have a small scale exemption, then a teacher in Ghana would not
have to worry. If we're talking about more than 100 students in 30
days, then there is probably some sort of central authority. For
example, if someone wrote a sex-ed piece that the Peace Corp gives to
it's members, then the Peace Corp probably has the resources to write
a few CD-R's. Of course, it is doubtful that the school kids in Ghana
will be able to use these CD-R's. Or even afford the price of "no
more than your cost of physically performing source distribution". So
I think this is not a serious problem.
Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu
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