Re: free licensing of TEI Guidelines
Hello,
Reply-To set, so cc'ing.
On 2004-02-15 03:58:51 +0000 Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman@Brown.edu> wrote:
What we would like is to be able
to ensure that the schemas derived from any modified Guidelines are
not confused with schemas derived from the original.[2]
You can't "ensure" it with any licence. You can take some steps with
many copyleft licences, but I comment about some of your more detailed
points later.
(Some would
say that what we actually want is even one step of indirection
further, that the document instances permitted by the schemas
extracted from the modified Guidelines not be confused with document
instances permitted by the schemas extracted from the original
Guidelines.[3])
I think this is only possible through namespaces and, as Henning
Makholm has pointed out, pathological cases will be possible under any
free licence. (Actually, they're probably possible under any licence
at all, as I doubt element names could be copyrighted.)
MJR> Is required deletion significantly better than required invariant
MJR> retention? I'm not sure.
Better for what? Protecting the copyright holders concerns or meeting
a particular set of guidelines for freedom to modify & distribute?
Achieving freedom to distribute modified version. Please don't focus
too tightly on the DFSG.
HM> If the deletion is required, it must be possible - then Debian
HM> could at least distribute copies with the section removed. (And
HM> then ship a cleanroom rephrasing of the relevant information in
HM> README.Debian).
I'm sorry, I don't understand this at all. Why would Debian be
interested in distributing Guidelines with the conformance section
removed?
We possibly could not distribute a copy with an invariant section in
Debian main while meeting our social contract obligations. I think
that is a little fuzzy and still a subject of debate.
MJR> I wonder how to handle the case where the author of a modified
MJR> version wishes to comment on that part, also including it.
If an author wishes to *comment on* the TEI Guidelines, he or she does
not need our permission to copy that portion he or she wishes to
discuss. That's fair use.
Fair use in the Berne convention is rather vague and I was told it is
problematic in some jurisdictions. It's safer not to depend upon it,
IMO.
i.e. they're afraid to defend fair use, the TEI-C has explicitly
stated anyone can copy up to an entire chapter without even asking.)
OK. I don't recall this information being posted before.
However, there seem to me to be a few obvious caveats:
* I would not want to be blamed for bad advice someone else added to
mine; thus I would want modifications to be indicated;
I think this is normal practice and reminders are in many copyright
licences.
* I would not want someone else to change my biography provided in the
"About the Author" section.
That seems silly. As long as they don't defame you, they can write
whatever they like about you. Surely it makes little difference
whether they do that by marked modifications to your words, or an
extra "About the Silly Original Author" section?
* The Paramedic Free Press Association would not want the colophon
information that is no longer true to be retained in a modified
version. (E.g., if part of the colophon says "This book was written
in its entirety using Emacs/psgml on a PowerMac 7100 running Debian
GNU/Linux 3.0 (Woody), and is valid against the DocBook XML 3.2
DTD.", but the modifications were not written on that system nor is
the result valid against DocBook 3.2.)
Again, seems silly. If they want to publish an untrue work, that is
their choice. I think that some untrue details about ECG wiring would
be worse than an untrue colophon. That is why I suggest indicating
your endorsement through digital signatures or other means which are
harder to forge. Then third parties can do some authentication without
asking you.
These "lumps of a work" (the bio and colophon) have nothing to do with
3-lead ECG interpretation, and preventing their modification (or
insisting that they be dropped from modified versions of the book)
doesn't seem to impair your ability to use, reuse, modify, and pass on
the (maybe modified) information about 3-lead ECG interpretation.
They are clearly limits on the freedom to use, reuse, modify and
distribute. The tethering of the 3-lead ECG interpretation
documentation to non-free material makes the combined work non-free,
although we may be able to create a free derived work if you allow us
to remove the non-free parts. This was explained to me by Branden
Robinson, Richard Braakman, Jeremy Hankins and others during the
"pickle-passing" sub-thread in July, which you can find in the list
archive.
I think part of free licensing is giving users the freedom to decide
which freedoms over the work they wish to use, not deciding that "you
don't get some freedom because I don't think it's useful to you".
Yes, I know. I only meant reserving strings in a manner similar to the
mechanism W3C uses for reserving any PI targets that match
"^[Xx][Mm][Ll]";
The base XML specification has a particular problem: you have to have
somewhere to start. Without xmlns, we wouldn't be able to disambiguate
XML documents. I think they grabbed too much of the namespace, but I
can see that they needed to take some. TEI doesn't have the same
reason: they can use xmlns to locate themselves from the XML
specification.
MJR> I don't think that limiting the root element really achieves your
MJR> goal.
Why not? If you come across a document whose root element is
<Herberts-TEI>, you should probably not be too surprised if software
that claims to work on TEI documents (whose root element is <TEI.2>)
does not work on it.
A root element of <TEI.2 xmlns="http://mjr.towers.org.uk/xmlns/tei2";
xmlns:TEI="...."> or similar should be possible.
What we'd like to prevent is Microsoft's
claiming that documents that conform to their modified Guidelines
conform to the TEI Guidelines (if they don't). That's all. I am
wondering (aloud on this list) whether or not
a) writing into the copyleft notice that modified elements should not
claim to be in the TEI namespace achieves this goal, and
I think it would help, but you can't *prevent* them. Black hats will
ignore all laws and notices. You wrote that in a footnote.
b) whether such a restriction is DFSG-free.
If the copyright permissions depend on it, I believe it would not be
DFSG-free
Here's a thought experiment. Since the Debian Policy Manual
is GPLed, I could make a modified version of said manual with a few
choice changes to the DFSG, and then create a Debian system that
adhered to *my* Debian Policy Manual that was just like Woody (and
would still be called Debian and Woody)
I think the Debian project currently uses trademark law to prevent
such abuses. You may need to call it Syddeb or something. You also
would need to avoid stating false things about the Debian project.
Question: what is "DSL", and is there general agreement that this is a
good way to go?
Michael Stutz "The Design Science Licence" July 2001, available at
http://www.dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt
A simpler licence would be better, but I think DSL is acceptable.
[2] Yes, we're fully aware that no copyright notice will actually
prevent people from copying in unapproved ways, that all it does
is give us some leverage in getting them to stop.
You can use copyright licences to help enforce all your trademarks or
deflect patent attacks, but I think there's consensus that isn't free.
--
MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read
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