Re: InaTux's "Author's Choice of Terminology License"
Heya
2009/6/8 oohay moc. <loopy_bajj@yahoo.com>:
> Yes. I don't know much about copyright. But, I would guess that with a
> properly written license, that you would "append" it to a legal copyright
> registration along with the work that the license is covering, and send it
> to the "patent office" of copyrights.
>
I'm not an expert as well but I am pretty sure you got this wrong.
There is no "patent office" in the loop. Anything a person creates is
a work which is copyrightable (e.g. I do a pencil drawing). And since
I created it, I'm the copyright holder (eg. I put on the back of it
with a pencil "Copyright 2009 Dmitrijs Ledkovs"). Now if I want to
distribute/publish so that people can do all sorts with it, I choose a
license. In the case of a pencil drawing (ok we can make it a bit more
sophisticated - SVG drawing in Inkscape) i would choose for example
CC-BY-SA license and I would write on the back of the picture that
(small legal paragraph of what license I'm publish this work under and
where to get the full text of the license). And that's it, after that
I can make photocopies of the drawing and give it to my next door
neighbour who can do all sorts of things with my drawing in the spirit
of open-source.
Copyright says who can decided what can be done with a work. License
gives permission to 3rd parties to do what the license tells them. Eg.
proprietary EULA impose all sorts of restrictions on you, while GPL
lets you do all sorts of things under certain conditions.
> And i realize that Debian is just the final collection of software for
> execution. All the Debian developers could do is recommend people license
> they software under the ACTL when they want to design something for the
> Debian operating system.
>
Most of the software included in Debian can be used on other operating
systems (Mostly UNIX-like platforms eg Linux,*BSD etc) so majority of
software in Debian is not "for Debian" only. There are some software
which did originate inside Debian (upstream is debian) e.g. apt, dpkg.
But again that software is not exclusive to Debian. Ubuntu uses that
software and so do many other distributions.
So I don't see any point in recommending ACTL for software developers.
> I don't know how it would work as a trademark license more than a copyright
> license. But I would guess it could be both, it would just matter which form
> one chose for the license, i.e. copyright+ACTL or trademark+ACTL.
>
I'm not sure what you mean by "trademark license" nor by "copyright
license". Never heard of trademark or copyright being used as an
adjective. As far as I know trademark, copyright, patent and license
are 4 different things, and each one of them has exact meaning and
legal definition.
> I don't know which one would actually be the one that would be able to
> restrict people's marketing terminology, which is what the license does.
>
If you don't know what you are proposing how can anyone on this
mailing list understand.....
And "Debian" as in trademark has already been registered. There are
some restrictions on it's usage as outlined here [1]
[1] http://debian.org/trademark
--
With best regards
Dmitrijs Ledkovs (for short Dima),
Ледков Дмитрий Юрьевич
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