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Re: Machine-interpretable debian/copyright with little files without copyright info



All'incirca Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:04:37 +0100,  Bas Wijnen
<wijnen@debian.org> sembrerebbe aver scritto:

> > In my packages (but I think that this applies to many others) I have
> > some very little files, such as README or tiny documentations, which
> > don't include any specification of copyright holder or license
> > terms, and that are so little that it would be absurd to add them.
> 
> Doesn't the combination have any either?  If the combination is big
> enough to be copyrightable (and that's not big at all), then without
> such a statement Debian cannot distribute it.  The statement doesn't
> have to be in every file (that's just recommended "to be sure", which
> I think is mostly about big files), but it has to be somewhere.

Well, in the package itself (that is, the tarball) nothing says that
these files are copyrighted under the GPL. All the other files have a
notice about their license. I think that the author didn't write one
for these, because he suppose it would be absurd to mind about copyright
for a little README or for a hundred lines of simple documentation,
just as it would be for me to mind about copyright when quoting parts
of email in replying.

I think that there is no reason to worry about distributing little files
just as the would be in the public domain, because they contain no
particular hard work to protect (and, as a matter of fact, ftp-masters
accepted the first version of my package, which contained such files).

And I think that the machine readable copyright format should handle
this case, adding a new pseudo-license code in the list present on the
Wiki.

It's not bad, about this topic, to take a look at:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/26/1612223
:-P

Thank you,
Giovanni.
-- 
Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani@gmail.com>
Pisa, Italy

Web: http://giomasce.altervista.org
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