Re: independent.nu - DFSG compatible?
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008, Sean Kellogg wrote:
> On Saturday 27 September 2008 04:53:50 pm Ben Finney wrote:
> > > ATTENTION!!
> > > The rights are totally free for all sounds. That means you can
> > > use them as much as you want in any context you like, without
> > > needing to ask for permission.
> >
> > Grants only right to "use", which is vague but not normally taken
> > to mean more than "perform" or "run"; i.e. a read-only use.
>
> How exactly can you just skip over the first sentence of this
> license in your analysis and go straight to a sentence that is
> nothing more than a description of a single instance of license
> interpretation?
The first sentence is nearly meaningless, and free of content that
would help understand precisely what is meant by "totally free".
Perhaps someone who understands the language in which this license was
written could weigh in and change the interpretation, but based on the
translation we were given, it is not DFSG free.
The key words here are what "totally free" means, and what "use"
means. If "totally free" means "you have the freedom to do anything
you wish with these works" then that's a different meaning entirely
than "you don't have to pay for these works". Likewise, if "use" means
just "perform", then it's totally different from a standin for "use in
any manner, including but not limited to modifcation, distribution,
and performance."
Since it's not clear that we've actually been granted the rights that
we need, we should in general assume that we haven't.
All of that said and done, if the copyright holder actually means for
the work to be DFSG free, using a license that is trivially understood
to be DFSG free is ideal.
Don Armstrong
--
Of course, there are cases where only a rare individual will have the
vision to perceive a system which governs many people's lives; a
system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then
such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that
the system really is there and that it aught to be exited from.
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter _Gödel Escher Bach. Eternal Golden Braid_
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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