Re: LiDIA's statement of GPL only in mailing list archives
* Don Armstrong:
> On Mon, 09 Jul 2007, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> * Don Armstrong:
>> > On Sun, 08 Jul 2007, Ben Finney wrote:
>> >> An email has been judged sufficient for many Debian packages, if it
>> >> unambiguously specifies all of the above, and is clearly from the
>> >> copyright holder. Copy and paste into the 'debian/copyright' file
>> >> the part of the message that has all that information, along with
>> >> that message's 'date', 'from', 'message-id' fields.
>> >
>> > Yeah; bonus points if the message is GPG signed by a key which is in
>> > and multiply connected to strongly connected set.
>>
>> Yeah, as if this made it a particularly authoritative source for any
>> kind of legal statement. 8-)
>
> Short of having a notarized signed statement, it's the best we can do;
> while there are obviously methods of exploiting it, it's clearly
> better than just an e-mail. Most importantly, it allows us to have a
> reasonable belief that the copyright holder has actually licensed us
> to distribute the work.
Huh? Why do you think so?
In most cases, the difficult question is not whether the statement was
made by the purported author, but whether the author is entitled to
make that statement on behalf of the actual copyright owner.
In the present case, it's likely that FH Worms holds the copyright,
not the department (which is not a legal entity in its own right and
cannot own any copyright). And the department (or its chair) cannot
make binding statements on behalf of the university. Perhaps we can
ignore this, but then we must be prepared to deal with a license
revocation.
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