Bug#740281: quickbrown.txt License question
On 27/02/14 21:38, Florian Schlichting wrote:
I'm in the process of packaging PerlIO::utf8_strict for Debian. The
module includes in its CPAN distribution a 2010 copy of the file
quickbrown.txt, very similar to the one you make available at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/quickbrown.txt. This file
contains your name at the top and a mention that the copyright for the
Thai example is owned by the Computer Association of Thailand, but I was
unable to find any license information either in that file or its
vicinity.
I never added a copyright or database licence because the file is largely
a compilation of other people's work, mostly with unknown authors. All I
feel able to do is to promise that I won't sue your project or anybody
regarding their use of this file. On the contrary, I am very delighted that
your project finds it useful, and that it has helped to get the
Linux/Unix community interested in UTF-8 nearly two decades ago.
I would be happy to release any copyright that I might share in this
file under e.g. a Creative Commons Attribution licence, but I
am not confident that Creative Commons is suitable for a compilation
of samples. I am not even sure that single-sentence pangrams
fall under copyright legislation: they are at the very short end of
what might count as a work of authorship.
If it had been a piece of example code, I would have simply added the line
License: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/short-license.html
which links to a page that explains my political reluctance to add
formal copyright licences to work that is probably far too short and
trivial to fall under copyright legislation.
You may feel reassured by the fact that since I compiled
the quickbrown.txt file, others have taken that list, expanded
it significantly, and put it onto Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pangrams
and I have not seen there any copyright concerns raised either.
I might add a non-licence phrase like "share any enjoy"
to the next version, to alleviate due-diligence copyright
concerns without contributing to an impression in the community
that even short sentences can actually be copyrighted.
The Thai example including its copyright message is exactly as I
received it. I left the copyright message intact mostly because
it sounded odd and interesting with its royal reference.
Unfortunately, I lost the contact details of its contributor.
Hope this helps ...
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain
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