Re: Bug#238245: Debian website's copyright and license suggestions?
<posted & mailed>
Tommi Vainikainen wrote:
> Hello members of debian-legal,
>
> It isn't currently well known that Debian website's license is Open
> Publication License, which has been judged to be non-free, and
> therefore needs to be changed.
We know. ;-)
> Currently web pages are "Copyright © 1997-2005 SPI" and license terms
> linking to Open Publication license are available at
> <URL: http://www.de.debian.org/license >. However SPI has not been
> collecting any paper work to transfer copyrights like FSF does, and
> probably many contributors do not even know about that their work is
> automatically copyrighted by SPI.
Well, actually, it isn't.... see below.
> So basically there is two questions:
>
> Does missing paperwork create a problem?
Yes. In the US, without a paper transfer, copyright is retained by the
author (except in work-for-hire cases, which actually might be relevant,
but I doubt it). That means that the copyright statements on the web pages
are wrong.
> And what would be good license for Debians web pages? (This is about
> content, the scripts used in generation are GNU GPL or otherwise
> freely licensed.)
Either GNU GPL v. 2 or 2-clause BSD or MIT/Expat. Author's choice, I think.
There is little harm in having different licenses for different web pages.
Each time a (manually generated) web page is changed significantly, the
copyright statement should be updated and the license agreed to by the new
author.
> Because copyright is currently claimed by SPI Inc, and SPI's board
> meeting is coming rather soon, I brought this issue to SPI's
> secretarys attention, but SPI board would appreciate some suggestion
> what they should decide about license change.
>
> I've Cc'ed the bug report about the issue, but Mail-followups does not
> contain bug report. Add it if needed, please.
--
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