Re: Public domain and DEP-5-compliant debian/copyright
Ben Finney writes ("Re: Public domain and DEP-5-compliant debian/copyright"):
> Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr> writes:
> > It has been established by the mavens from this list that the
> > copyright statements contradict the "public domain" assertion, and
> > that simply stating "This program is in the public domain" is not
> > enough to make it so in general.
>
> I've been a primary proponent of that point of view, and I think it's
> probably correct. But I wouldn't claim it's *established*; no qualified
> legal expert has said anything so definite here, I believe.
I disagree with Ben. The question of freeness is a question of
practical capacity, not a theoretical exercise. We should be asking:
can our users and downstreams exercise the freedoms we want them to
have, without taking significant risks ?
> Rather, I think such a declaration is not established to be an effective
> divestment of copyright in all the jurisdictions where Debian recipients
> operate, and the risk to them is unacceptable —
Are you aware of _any_ case where a piece of software was released
with a statement from its copyrightholders saying it was "public
domain", but where later the copyrightholders reneged on the implied
permissions ?
Note that even copyrightholders who use proper Free copyright licences
sometimes make legally unfounded claims against us or our downstreams.
Empirically I would be very surprised if the risk from legally-naive
copyrightholders, who try to `put things in the public domain', was
greater than the risk from copyrightholders who issue proper licences.
We're not talking about a situation where the whole thing might be a
deliberate trap. If someone like IBM or Oracle came out with a
`public domain' statement we should be very suspicious - but that's
not (ever) what we're dealing with.
And all of this is before we get into questions of estoppel (or its
equivalent in various jurisdictions).
> especially because it's
> quite easy for the copyright holder to correctly apply a known simple
> free-software license that grants all the relevant permissions.
I don't see how it allegedly being `easy' to fix increases the risk to
Debian and our users and downstreams. It's totally irrelevant.
And, of course, it's not true. Licensing decisions are
political decisons, and often contested. Issues which mix politics
and legal technicalities in this way are not `easy'.
By `easy' you mean `easy if you do what I say'. But putting forward
such an opinion in a political context is at the very least arrogant
and can appear disingenuous.
Ian.
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