Re: A possible GFDL compromise
On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Jacobo Tarrio wrote:
>> drawn to the condition "You may not use technical measures to obstruct
>> or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or
>> distribute."
>> If "make or" were stricken, and perhaps some clarification added to
>> ensure that secure transport channels between distributor and
>> distributee were not a problem, this particular problem might go away.
> Or if this condition and the "transparent format" stuff were changed to say
>something to the effect to "if you distribute this work in a format that
>obstructs the exercise of the rights given by this license, you must provide
>a way for its recipient to get a full copy of the work in a format that
>doesn't obstruct the exercise of these rights".
All these reqirements is completely miss the point, IMHO,
and, therefore, completely unneeded.
Documentation in not a software. There is no any one-way
transformation from the source to the binary. All problems with
distribution and modification of documents is a legal, not technical
problems.
At the very least, if you can read the document, you always,
technically, can OCR it. An experience shows, that, if you should
not care about legal requirements (because you has the right from
license, you OCR public domain or, simply, you do not care about a
law), it takes no more than 24-48 man\hours to completely OCR a
large 500-700pages book. And there always will bee volunteers to do
that.
So, GFDL really needed only one requrement: forbidding to
place further legal restriction on the format of derivative work.
But, BTW, I do not see how these restrictions in the current GFDL
any more restrective than similar restrictions in GPL.
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