Re: The bigger issue is badly licensed blobs (was Re: Firmware poll

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@fastmail.fm>]

Anthony Towns wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 12:15:20AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
>> I'd love to see a legal opinion from the SPI lawyers regarding who would
>> be liable if Debian did commit copyright infringment (or whatever) and
>> someone sued.
> 
> FWIW, there's a few things I'd love to see legal opinions on too,
> including the Java/non-free questions John Goerzen raised some time
> ago. They're still pending on SPI's todo list. If any qualified lawyers
> with experience in the US are reading this and would like to volunteer
> some of their time on a pro-bono basis to benefit Debian and other free
> software organisations such as FreeDesktop.org and PostgreSQL, sending
> mail to board@spi-inc.org to that effect might be worthwhile.

OK, good to know that this is a systemic problem.  :-/  It's just lack of
resources, not obstructionism!  Sorry for accusing you of obstructionism....

I guess having a sum total of one volunteer pro-bono lawyer is not a good
way to get legal opinions in a timely fashion. :-/  Perhaps if we could get
someone to volunteer, oh, at least a few hours a month?  :-/  It's not like
Debian raises very many legal questions, but we now have a backlog.

Perhaps this request should be posted somwhere else, but where?  I doubt any
lawyers are reading -vote or -general.  I know of one who's reading -legal
regularly, but he's not a *US* lawyer.

I should specify that a lawyer with some background in copyrights, 
trademarks, or licenses/unilateral contracts would be most valuable, as
those are what comes up most often (well, all the time really).  And
for someone with background in the right area, our questions are probably
relatively easy to answer; they might not require much if any research.

-- 
Nathanael Nerode  <neroden@fastmail.fm>

Bush admitted to violating FISA and said he was proud of it.
So why isn't he in prison yet?...