Re: Bug#669356: electricsheep unsuitable for Debian main?
Hi Scott,
Thanks for your quick reply and directly taking part in this.
On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:03:26AM -0400, spot@draves.org wrote:
> Thanks Linus, glad you like it.
>
> I am not aware that Debian restricts the content that programs can
> download or calculate. For example a regular web browser downloads
> copyrighted non-CC content all the time. And it shows you ads in
> order to finance its development. I would argue that our model is
> less intrusive, since the user is not disturbed or distracted at all.
Hmm, interesting point. I agree, embedding license information or ads
in the animations themselves would severly harm their beauty.
However as far as I know the electricsheep package currently heavily
relies on non-free content to function properly which could make
it unsuitable for Debian main. A web browser does not require
non-free content. I think it does not make a difference whether
such required content gets downloaded during runtime or whether it
was provided within the package. I'd guess that packages like
gnuvd-gnome or googleearth-package ended up in Debian contrib because
of similar reasons. Hmm, I'm CC'ing debian-legal as they should be
more familiar with the Debian policies than I am.
>
> But you are right, the package description could be more explicit
> (instead of just saying so in the man page). How about adding this
> text:
>
> "The videos downloaded and displayed by Electric Sheep are Creative
> Commons licensed (a mixture of CC-BY and CC-BY-NC). Some jobs
> rendered by the network may be for images or animations which are not
> sheep at all, and will not appear in the screen-saver. Some of these
> are used for commercial purposes in order to support the developers
> and servers that make the software."
Sounds better. But I think at least some information on how to
easily find the proper attribution for a specific sheep might be needed
to properly comply with the CC license. This should probably be
added to the manpage and Debian package's copyright file then as well,
I guess (which do not mention any Creative Commons licensing yet at all).
Maybe the complete attribution information might even need to get
downloaded together with the sheep, not sure how to interpret
section 4.b of the CC-BY license exactly.
@debian-legal: Is it enough to have this in a package description
/ copyright file or would a prompt during package installation be
needed? Is refering to an external website for the complete
attribution enough?
Hmm, I also had some more thoughts about the fifth point I made
(i.e. rendering/uploading under license terms the user did not
give consent to). My first thought was that the electricsheep
executable might need to ask for consent before uploading any of
this (similar like OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia ask for it when you
create an account there) to make the CC license enforceable and to
avoid any restrictive copyright claims and lawsuits from a user
who generated a sheep (= having rendered a movie). But on
second thought, I'm not sure anymore whether this is really
needed.
@debian-legal: Is the result of running an algorithm
copyrightable by the person who provided the CPU cycles in some
countries? Does it make a difference whether this algorithm is
deterministic, non-deterministic, distributed, user-parameterisable,
...?
By the way, is the rendering process deterministic or could someone
claim having contributed a creative input to the resulting,
rendered movie? Hmm, and now I'm also starting to wonder whether a
genome created by an algorithm can actually, legally be CC-BY-NC
licensed (which would otherwise be contrary to what
http://electricsheep.org/reuse claims).
If the rendered movies are not copyrightable by the renderer, then
my sixth point might be invalid as well due to
only applying to uploaded sheep genomes (the flam3 files), a
process which is not part of this package. But not sure, maybe the
sixth point might still be relevant due to a violation of the
Debian social contract's "We will give back to the free software
community" and "Our priorities are our users and free software"
as long as no publicly verifieable record of any financial
income going back to the community exists. And the "No Discrimination
Against Fields of Endeavor" clause in the Debian social contract,
of course.
For similar reasons, the non-transparent extra rendering jobs, point 3,
might be in violation of the Debian social contract, even if the user
gets properly notified about their presence. These jobs can be
deactivated via the "--standalone" switch, but this is not the
default and will make this package difficult to use for most
people. (Hmm, how difficult is it to add another switch to let a user
voluntarily activate contributing rendering cycles to
electricsheep.org for non-free jobs? How difficult is it to make
the correct enforcement of such an option verifiable by the user?)
Cheers, Linus
>
> ?
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 7:03 AM, Linus Lüssing <linus.luessing@web.de> wrote:
> >
> > Package: electricsheep
> > Version: 2.7~b12+svn20091224-1.1
> > Severity: important
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Thanks for maintaining the electricsheep package in Debian. It works
> > great for me and I really love it. The idea behind it is great,
> > those animations are stunning!
> >
> > However I'm currently wondering whether there might be issues with
> > the legal status of electricsheep and the Debian guidelines, maybe making
> > it unsuitable for Debian main. As I'm not certain and not that familiar
> > with the Debian legal side, I'd be curious about your thoughts on this.
> >
> > What electricsheep currently does by default (correct me if I'm wrong):
> > * It downloads flam3 "genome" data and videos from a server.
> > * The machine generated flam3 data is CC-BY-NC, human generated flam3 data
> > is CC-BY licensed, the video files are all CC-BY-NC licensed
> > (according to http://electricsheep.org/reuse).
> > * Sometimes even non-CC, plainly copyrighted data is downloaded onto the
> > machine and rendered according to the manpage
> > ("Some jobs rendered by the network [...]") and the website.
> >
> > I'm wondering whether the following things are violations of Debian policies
> > (at least for Debian main):
> > * The downloaded, CC-BY-NC licensed data.
> > * The downloaded, plainly copyrighted data for the hidden extra
> > rendering jobs.
> > * The hiden extra rendering jobs in general.
> > * The missing license information for the downloaded flam3 and video files
> > (neither does the executable nor the Debian installation process
> > enforce/inform about the CC license)
> > * Movies (ak. sheep) rendered and uploaded by the user are CC-BY-NC and
> > attributed to "Scott Draves and the Electric Sheep" according to
> > http://electricsheep.org/reuse - without neither the executable nor the
> > Debian installation process ever asking for the user's consent to these
> > license terms for movies rendered by this user.
> > * The one-sided CC-BY-NC enforcement (i.e. Scott Draves can use any
> > electricsheep rendered by anyone for commercial purposes, but no one else
> > effectively can - I know, according to his forum posts on electricsheep.org
> > those sales are being used to keep electricsheep servers and development
> > running and I believe him, that he's making use of this advantage in the
> > best interest of the community and I definitely think he'd deserve an
> > advantage like that for all his work on this awesome project, but
> > unfortunately this process is again not transparent)
> >
> >
> > Let me know what you think, whether some of these points are valid or
> > not and what the implications for the electricsheep package in Debian
> > would be. If there are any valid issues making it non-compliant with
> > Debian main then I hope that we can sort these out as anything else
> > would be a loss for both the Debian and electricsheep project in my
> > opinion.
> >
> >
> > Cheers, Linus
> >
> >
> > -- System Information:
> > Debian Release: wheezy/sid
> > APT prefers unstable
> > APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
> > Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
> >
> > Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
> > Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> > Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
> >
> > Versions of packages electricsheep depends on:
> > ii curl 7.25.0-1
> > ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.42
> > ii flam3 3.0.1-2.1
> > ii gconf2 3.2.3-4
> > ii libatk1.0-0 2.4.0-2
> > ii libavcodec53 5:0.10.2-0.2
> > ii libavformat53 5:0.10.2-0.2
> > ii libavutil51 5:0.10.2-0.2
> > ii libc6 2.13-27
> > ii libcairo2 1.12.0-2
> > ii libexpat1 2.1.0~beta3-2
> > ii libfontconfig1 2.8.0-3.1
> > ii libfreetype6 2.4.9-1
> > ii libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 2.26.0-2
> > ii libglade2-0 1:2.6.4-1
> > ii libglib2.0-0 2.32.0-3
> > ii libgtk2.0-0 2.24.10-1
> > ii libjpeg-progs 8d-1
> > ii libpango1.0-0 1.30.0-1
> > ii libxml2 2.7.8.dfsg-7
> > ii mplayer 3:1.0~rc4+svn20120324-0.0
> > ii xloadimage 4.1-17
> > ii zlib1g 1:1.2.6.dfsg-2
> >
> > electricsheep recommends no packages.
> >
> > electricsheep suggests no packages.
> >
> > -- no debconf information
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> www.ScottDraves.com
>
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