Re: Debian Legal summary of the X-Oz License
----- Original Message -----
From: "MJ Ray" <mjr@dsl.pipex.com>
To: "selussos" <mgr@x-oz.com>
Cc: <debian-legal@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 8:56 PM
Subject: Re: Debian Legal summary of the X-Oz License
> On 2004-03-08 00:59:06 +0000 selussos <mgr@x-oz.com> wrote:
>
> >> However, I think the use is significantly different. The copyright
> >> permissions granted by the X.org licence found at
> >> http://www.x.org/Downloads_terms.html do not seem to be conditional
> >> on that
> >> term. The permissions of the X-Oz licence are.
> >>
> >> Could you please look at the X.org and X-Oz licences again and
> >> notice this
> >> difference? If you want to mimic the X.org licence, then will you
> >> make that
> >> clause a notice in the footer instead, please? Copyright licence
> >> conditions
> >> are the wrong way to police trademarks.
> >
> > That possibly could be your own _personal_ prejudice which is
> > understandable
> > but I think that U.S. Copyright is fairly well deployed throughout
> > this world
> > and is internationally recognized.
>
> It's not prejudice, but understanding. It took some time to understand
> that copyright licences can easily become non-free if you try to use
> them to enforce trademarks. Most of my learning curve is in the -legal
> list archive. If you want to learn about it, I suggest the "Jeff
> Licquia" thread (good summary from Branden in July 2002
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200207/msg00256.html),
> the "TEI Guidelines" thread (recent, but a bit wordy and vague) and
> the various "logo" threads.
>
> Next, United States copyright law has the United States as its scope
> and I'm not sure that anywhere else recognises exactly the same words.
> If you want to look at the international agreements, the main one is
> the Berne Convention. You can find the text at
> http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html amongst
> others. Your copyright adviser should be able to tell you more about
> this.
>
> Nothing that I know makes a notice mean the same as a condition of a
> permission grant. Can you see why a condition of the permission grant
> (such as your condition clause 4) is different to a notice in the
> licence (such as the X.org phrase that you mentioned)? If you wish to
> achieve the same effect as the X.org licence, will you change
> condition clause 4 into a notice at the end, like the X.org licence,
> please?
>
I will be away for several days because of business requirements
and such will not be able to familiarize myself with your concerns until
I return.
I can only state that if the 4th clause is indeed your concern
there is a lot more software than ours that you should be worried
about, and so I must ask, why aren't you? And why is debian
distributing that, and by so doing so obviously acknowledging their
validity but now ours? I would hate to think that something as
provincial as prejudice against one our officers is the cause.
At this point, and because of the great amount of time and effort
this is taking, I must ask all of you to address this concern of mine.
Sue
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