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The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licensesThe Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licensesPosted Oct 27, 2004 10:59 UTC (Wed) by cantsin (guest, #4420)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Thanks for this excellent article which sums up the current issues of open content licenses nicely. There is, however, yet another troublesome issue for Free Software documentation released under free documentation/open content licenses, namely the incompatibility of those licenses with the GPL and BSD licenses. They become a problem in two cases:
At the institution where I currently work, Piet Zwart Institute for Media Desig nin Rotterdam/Netherlands, we are in the final stages of putting out a 100-pages Open Content Licensing Guide which compares all existing open content licenses and describes their particular aims, advantages and drawbacks. The text was principally authored by Lawrence Liang, a lawyer and member of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. At the moment, I can only provide a provisional link to Lawrence's project page, but the guide will be published both in print and be downloadble under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
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The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Oct 27, 2004 14:22 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] #2 is not a problem. Code samples in documentation are obviously quotes and covered under the same rules as quoting from a text document.
Why would that be otherwise?
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Oct 27, 2004 16:37 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] It is a problem. Short code examples can be included based on "fair use" even when the licenses conflict, but anything more substantial cannot be moved from a GPL'd file collection to a GFDL'd file collection or vice versa without all the copyright holders agreeing to a license change. For example, you might like the example calculator program in the Bison manual; you might want to take it, enhance it a bit, and distribute it. But you can't mix it with any GPL'd code, and you might need a lawyer to help you figure out what you have to do to distribute the executable.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Oct 27, 2004 16:44 UTC (Wed) by kimoto (subscriber, #5244) [Link] On debian-legal, it is often asserted that there are jurisdictions where there is no such thing as "fair use". (IANAL so can't pass judgment on that.)
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Oct 28, 2004 5:07 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Such assertions are demonstrably wrong. Without fair use, you couldn't quote even the tiniest portion of a copyrighted work, or even read aloud (what? you are performing the work without the explicit permission of the copyright holder!) and I know of no country where people fear prosecution for quoting one line of a book. That shows that everyone has some concept of fair use, even if they don't call it that.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Oct 28, 2004 6:54 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link] They do not exist in the EU, which is a larger market than the US. Instead the US has quotation rights, which allow you to quote from a document. It is a lot more restrictive than fair use.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Nov 4, 2004 8:56 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] I'll give you an example of a jurisdiction where there is no *statutory* concept of "fair use".
In practice we get away with it under common law (and bringing lawsuits is expensive - the doctrine of "loser pays" and "plaintiff pays for nuisance suits" means prosecution is unlikely).
As an example - I make a "fair use" quote. The copyright owner sues me. I offer to pay the value of the work. The owner is now in a dilemma. If he accepts my offer, he's paid hundreds of pounds of court fees and got tens of pounds in copyright fees back (I don't have to pay his costs). If he *doesn't* accept my offer, and then the judge/jury accept my offer as reasonable, he not only has to pay *his* legal costs, but *mine* *as* *well*.
Lawsuits just don't happen under those sorts of rules ...
Cheers,
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Nov 4, 2004 8:58 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] Whoops - I didn't say what exactly that jurisdiction was. It's pretty clearly mine, the UK.
Cheers,
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Oct 27, 2004 18:07 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] GPL version 3 is going to have some problems in solving the problem. while the 'default' GPL license is 'GPLv2 or newer' there are a number of projects (including the linux kernel) that are 'GPL v2' instead and it's going to be practicly impossilbe to get hold of all the authors to get them to agree to re-license these projects under a new license, even if that license is GPLv3
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Oct 28, 2004 9:09 UTC (Thu) by dvrabel (subscriber, #9500) [Link] Code examples in documentation should surely be public domain? They're supposed to be copied and incorperated in other programs. Perhaps the documentation license needs a clause making this explicit.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses Posted Oct 28, 2004 22:39 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] More problematic is the case where the program itself contains significant portions of its documentation, like LaTeX or Emacs. In these cases, you need to move arbitrary text between the documentation and the program, not just code samples.
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