On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 12:14:46PM -0700, Walter Landry wrote:
> 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.
So you are suggesting that taking a DFCL-licensed document, making no
changes to it, but printing it out on a laser printer that has
proprietary fonts built into it should be a prohibited activity, for
which we need an exception?
I would disagree.
> > 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?
I was thinking of .oggs, actually. ;-)
Actually, except for tag editing, neither .ogg nor .mp3 is the preferred
format for making changes to an audio work. I don't even want to think
about the artifacts that would result if you attempted this.
The preferred form for making changes to an audio stream would instead
be, for instance, WAVE or FLAC.
> 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.
There is a difference. The intended application of the DFCL is for
works whose primary value lies in direct perception by a human being.
Software's value is different, both in source and object form.
For instance, consider our hypothetical Professor Smith above. It
presumably doesn't *matter* to him/her or his/her students what font is
in the printer, or how it is licensed. They neither know nor care. As
long as they can read the text, their needs are met.
> 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 hope not. I think we need to consider the above two examples, and
others like them, long and hard. They could be *the* central issue for
this license.
We need to:
1) Ensure that people have unlimited permission to do sane and
reasonable things, like netcast a piece of DFCL music, print out a DFCL
document, and perform a DFCL play.
2) Ensure that people can modify and distribute DFCL licensed works
without hamstringing or preventing their consumers' rights in goal 1).
This is the essence of copyleft.
> > 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.
Your limit is arbitrary and your assumption is purely speculative. I am
extremely resistant to letting hypotheticals drive the adoption of
arbitrary limits in our license. Please, give me hard data.
> 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".
In way, this expresses a ghastly level of disenfrachisement from the
creative commons, but a discussion of this would probably get way, way
off topic and lead me into some sort of bizzare left-wing humanist
political nexus where Ralph Nader, Eugene Debs, and Lawrence Lessig
converge[1], so I'll just acknowlegde that as off-topic and move on. :)
(BTW, it's "Peace Corps". The "p" and the "s" are silent, but they're
there. :) )
> So I think this is not a serious problem.
Okay, what follows is a brainstorm, not an argument...
Perhaps the copyleft restriction pertaining to redistribution of
modified works in source form need only apply to transformations which
were deliberately applied for their own sake? I'll admit, there's
weasel room in that, but...
If you're applying a transformation to work a work so that you can
dervice some economic benefit from it (i.e., to sell your version),
you're tautologically doing so deliberately. If your transformations
are "accidental", you shouldn't have a problem providing open access to
your modified version in consumable form, as well as the un-transformed
source.
In other words, if Professor Smith is printing out the DFCL-licensed
document using a proprietary, achingly-beautiful font, and he is selling
that printout because of the font, then what is of value is not the
DFCL-licensed work, but the font itself. He could just as well be
printing out Shakespeare, the Bible, the first five Sherlock Holmes
books, or any other work in the public domain, and presumably these
would be just as valuable.
If, on the other hand, Professor Smith is selling the work for the
combined value of the font and the DFCL-licensed work, where the latter
of the value is clearly not zero for his purposes, then the traditional
copyleft restriction would prevent him from doing so, unless he's
willing to license his font freely (assuming it's his to license, which
leads us to...).
A traditional GPL-style copyleft certainly prevents the proprietary
equalization/compression-using netcaster scenario. The problem is when
proprietary technologies impose themselves into the dissemination stream
for the work despite the good and honorable intentions of the
distributor. Consider what just might be happening with digital
television broadcast streams in the U.S.; a mandatory anti-copying
mechanism bolted onto the content. Consider that the DVD CCA won't
grant you a license to claim that your optical disk playback device is a
"DVD" player (let alone license the patents) unless you agree to
implement the CSS technology and enforce region codes.
I guess what this is drifting towards is that ever-misunderstood
"operating system" clause of the GPL:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed
need not include anything that is normally distributed (in
either source or binary form) with the major components
(compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which
the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies
the executable.
I guess what we need is an exception for anything in the technology
stream between the distributor and those he is distributing to, as long
as he has no relationship with any entity that has proprietary ownership
of any process that is applied to the data while it travels from him to
his consumers.
An amusing consequence of this is that because all the major U.S. movie
studios are in cahoots with the DVD CCA, such a broadly-worded
restriction would prevent them from disseminating a DFCL-licensed
independent film on DVD[4], but would let truly independent publishers
market it. For me, this is a delicious irony, however more thought
needs to be given this exception to ensure that it really does
accurately work towards the two goals I enumerated above:
1) Ensure that people have unlimited permission to do sane and
reasonable things, like netcast a piece of DFCL music, print out a DFCL
document, and perform a DFCL play.
2) Ensure that people can modify and distribute DFCL licensed works
without hamstringing or preventing their consumers' rights in goal 1).
This is the essence of copyleft.
I personally am not going to lose any sleep if the permissions in 1) are
effectively withdrawn for large, powerful entities that have a very long
history of performing the converse of 2) ("hamstringing or preventing
their consumers' exercise of rights"). They colluded, conspired, and
anti-competed their way into that bed, they can lie in it.
What do you think?
[1] ...given that the political alternative is paying exorbitant
licensing fees for all your consumer electronics to the MPAA, RIAA,
ABC/Disney[2], et al., I'm not sure such a discussion would be a bad
thing. :-P
[2] It is a testament to the moral bankruptcy of economic conservatives
in the United States that the "laissez-faire" in "laissez-faire
economics" is de facto reserved to artificial, state-chartered constructs
-- corporations[3] -- rather than to individuals, which are the only
beings in our political system who possess rights. *There's* something
to pull you right-wing Objectivists to my side of the policical
spectrum. >;-)
[3] ...and this is the hateful legacy of Santa Clara County v. Southern
Pacific Railroad Company, the worst U.S. Supreme Court decision ever.
http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/santa/
[4] Unless, of course, they negotiated a different licensing arrangment
with the copyright holder.
--
G. Branden Robinson | There's nothing an agnostic can't
Debian GNU/Linux | do if he doesn't know whether he
branden@debian.org | believes in it or not.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Graham Chapman
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