Re: About the statement about Debian and the CC licenses on Wikipedia.
Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> Here are the clauses about DRMs in versions 2.5 and 3.0 of the CC-BY
> licenses respectively.
> You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or
> publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures
> that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with
> the terms of this License Agreement.
Notice that this says you may not use any technological measures that
control access while you're publicly displaying or performing the work
*regardless of whether you're distributing it*. In other words, this
wording, on its face, restricts how you *use* the work in your own
environment, provided that's "public" in some sense, even if you're not
redistributing it.
There were similar worries over some drafts of the anti-DRM provisions in
the GFDL.
The new wording avoids this problem:
> When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work, You may not impose
> any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the
> ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights
> granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.
...by explicitly limiting the requirement to the context of conveying the
work to a third party and saying that you can't limit their usage, which
is what was really intended.
It also avoids other edge cases, such as when you might introduce DRM for
some technical reason but simultaneously convey a non-DRM version of the
work. For example, suppose that you want to use it on a device that
*requires* everything be controlled with DRM. The previous wording would
prevent you from ever making the work available on that device; the
current wording allows you to do that as long as you *also* provide the
recipient with the necessary pieces that they aren't restricted by the
restrictions of that device for other uses.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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