Re: About the statement about Debian and the CC licenses on Wikipedia.
On Friday, March 01, 2013 08:19:44 PM Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
Doesn't AGPL suffer from this exact problem (use restrictions when not
distributing code)?
Scott K
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