Hei,
laitanpa tästäkin kopion finland@ -listalle.
-Timo
-----Original Message----- From: Steve Langasek vorlon@debian.org Sent: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:37:55 -0700 To: Timo Juhani Lindfors timo.lindfors@iki.fi Cc: debian-legal@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: National Land Survey open data licence - version 1.0 - 1 May 2012
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 11:36:30AM +0300, Timo Juhani Lindfors wrote:
[ Replying to an old thread. For your convenience here's a link to the original thread: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2012/05/msg00014.html ]
Francesco Poli invernomuto@paranoici.org writes:
- remove the name of the Licensor from the product or service, if required to do so by the Licensor.
I am personally convinced that such a requirement is non-free.
I think it's very similar to one of the clauses found in CC-v3.0 licenses. See for instance my analysis of CC-by-v3.0: https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/07/msg00124.html
However, Debian FTP-masters disagree with me on the freeness of works released under the terms of CC-v3.0 licenses: https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2010/01/msg00084.html Hence, it's *possible* (but not granted) that FTP-masters would consider the above-discussed section 2.2 as acceptable, unfortunately.
It seems that since CC has such a clause it is getting copied to other licenses. I heard of one such license this week:
"Helsinki Region Infoshare – data pool licence
- The licensor (holder of copyright or associated rights in the
licensed material) hereby grants the licensee (user of the licensed material under the terms of this licence) a global, free of charge, non-exclusive, permanent licence to copy, disseminate, edit, combine and otherwise use the licensed material according to the terms and conditions set out in items 2 and 3 below. The licensed material may be used for non-commercial and commercial purposes. 2. The original copyright information in the licensed material must be acknowledged in the manner indicated by the licensor. This attribution must be deleted if so requested by the licensor. 3. The copyright details of the licensed material must not be attributed in any way that suggests that the publisher of the licensed material endorses the user or the use of the data material."
-- http://www.hri.fi/lisenssit/hri-nimea/
Note that while CC has "to the extent practicable" to shoften the requirement this softening is not present anymore in "National Land Survey open data licence" or this "Helsinki Region Infoshare – data pool licence".
Could this "to the extend practicable" be the key difference why CC would be considered free but these two new licenses would not?
Does Finnish law recognize the concept of author's rights (moral rights)?
It appears that the intent of this clause is to reassert a right that is already granted by law in some jurisdictions: the right for their name not to be associated with a mutilated form of their work.
If this were a license used by a copyright holder in France or Germany, where I know such moral rights exist, then I believe this clause would be a no-op and should therefore be ignored when evaluating the freeness of the license. When used by a Finnish copyright holder, I'm not sure; this may be an example of a "tentacles of evil" effect from the license. There's also the fact that, as worded, it does *not* refer to the author, it refers to the Licensor who may be a different party.
So it's possible that there are some bugs in the wording, of both the CC license and the licenses you cite. I do think, however, that they're compatible in *intent* with the DFSG, which has explicit provisions regarding the integrity of authors' works. Requiring a rename or requiring changes be carried as patches is not conceptually different from requiring removal of attribution. None of these requirements are something we recommend to authors, but they are free.
The National Land Survey license does have a pretty major bug that the other two do not, due to differences in wording (another example of why people shouldn't write their own licenses):
* remove the name of the Licensor from the product or service, if required to do so by the Licensor.
This does *not* say that you must remove the name from the *attribution*. It says you must remove the name, which implies you must remove it from anywhere it appears, including in functional elements.
In practice, if someone wanted to package data distributed under this license, they could sanitize that data by proactively removing any occurrences of the Licensor's name first *except* for the credits; once done, this degenerates to the previous case. But it's obviously a hassle to do that.
All in all, with respect to these clauses I side with the ftp masters (who have already accepted CC-BY-SA 3.0) and believe they're DFSG-compatible, though I would definitely not recommend any of these clauses.