On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 04:36:09PM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote: > So, given that we have: > > - a good-faith effort to respect rights that may not even have existed > at the time, > > - no way of identifying additional authors besides those contacted by > DEC, > > - a significant burden of proof on the part of any claimant, given that > said claimant did not respond at the time of DEC's inquiry in addition > to the ease which alphabetized word lists may be generated, > > - significant jurisdictional issues surrounding the applicability of > the Database Directive to DEC, the upstream author, or Debian itself, > > - a significant likelihood that we would be joined in legal liability > by Hewlett-Packard, the current owners of DEC's assets and a friendly > ally of both free software and the Debian project, > > I vote that we treat the copyright to this list the same way we treat > patents generally: wait for someone to complain before pulling the > list. The situation is analogous; just as we cannot know which patents > we currently infringe upon, given the volume of patents and the volume > of code we distribute, so here we cannot know which copyrights we > infringe upon, due to our disconnection from their original authors. > > At any rate, it seems unlikely to me that anyone will be able to hold us > responsible for willful infringement given the circumstances surrounding > any holder's disregard for his/her rights up to this point. I second this. Does anyone, particularly from the European Union, want to oppose it? -- G. Branden Robinson | The National Security Agency is Debian GNU/Linux | working on the Fourth Amendment branden@debian.org | thing. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Phil Lago, Deputy XD, CIA
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