RPL 1.5 discussion

[Philippe Verdy]

No, I've not said that. The kind of attribution that is needed is the
obligation to carry the copyright notice along with a clear identification
of the author and the jurisdiction where it resides and has its rights and
obligations protected and/or mandated by law.

Such obligations are already more explicitly made about publishers since
centennials in the press and book industry, it was required since many a
half century for telematic applications, then repeated for publishers of
vocal phone services, it is normally required too on the Internet.

So copyright lines that just say : "copyright (c) 2006 example.com"
in the web site hosted on the internet domain "example.com", are completely
invalid: domain names are not legal identities given that they don't belong
to their registrant, and donot survive more than one year of subscription,
and there's still no legalregistry about their historic reservation (in
addition, to reserve a internet domain, you still don't need to be securely
identified).

The kind of required information include a identifiable author name or
legitimate right owner, a jurisdiction where it is known (and where its
legal existence can be verified in official records).

For physical persons, this is not a problem, but for moral persons (i.e.
organizations) the fact they may need to display their name in a copyright
notice to conform to laws applicable to them and to defend their rights,
cannot be considered as advertising. Laws may also describe minimum
conditions for finding this attribution. If this is only present in the
source files, it is not enough. If it is only present in the executable, it
will not conform to its sources and will not be open-source or free
software. So the notice must be present in both forms, and ina binary
application, this must be accessible to any user,without having to use
complicate technical means (so when the copyright notice is displayed in an
About box or at startup, the application is just conforming to the
obligations.

Note that this notice cannot be furtive: it must be readable even to slow
readers. So it's not irreasonnable to demand a minimum size. However
demanding that a logo be displayed, or advertising a website is not
reasonable, because these don't add anything to the correct identification
of the organization or person, and gives today absolutely no indication
about the applicable jurisdiction and the associated rights and obligations
associated to that right owner.

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Lawrence Rosen [mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com]
> Envoyé : jeudi 20 septembre 2007 06:17
> À : 'License Discuss'
> Objet : RE: RPL 1.5 discussion
> 
> Philippe Verdy wrote:
> > So any licence should tolerate these mandatory legal attributions,
> because
> > not accepting them would make the licence completely invalid and not
> > enforceable in many countries (where the legality of publications in the
> > "public domain", without a protected signature, i.e. anonymously, is
> also
> > highly questionable, and the destruction of these identifiable
> signatures
> > is illegal).
> 
> I don't understand all that. But if you want to make sure that appropriate
> attribution is protected in your special jurisdiction, then I suggest that
> AFL, OSL and Non-Profit OSL 3.0 already take care of that. They provide
> for
> an "Attribution Notice" of your own composition that must be retained in
> the
> source code of licensed software. (See section 6 of both licenses.)
> 
> The issue about whether executable copies must display notices is
> different
> from this. I doubt seriously that any jurisdiction in the world requires a
> visible attribution notice identifying the licensor on the screens of
> users
> of executable software in order to afford copyright protection to the
> software code itself or to enforce the open source license for that
> software.
> 
> /Larry Rosen
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p at wanadoo.fr]
> > Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 7:12 PM
> > To: 'Matthew Flaschen'; 'License Discuss'
> > Subject: RE: RPL 1.5 discussion
> >
> > Matthew Flaschen [mailto:matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu] wrote:
> > > Now that I have considered the license, I have several comments.  Most
> > > importantly, I object to the attribution clause in its current form.
> It
> > > has the same issues as earlier drafts of CPAL, but without the
> > > compromises (e.g. only on one screen, 10 words, etc.) OSI agreed to.
> I
> > > would be reluctant to support any more attribution licenses until CPAL
> > > has been out for a while (say a year).
> >
> > I also don't like long required attribution notices. However there are
> > some
> > conditions where this is unavoidable, not because of the licence itself
> > but
> > about legal requirements for correct attribution of authors (that have
> > unconditional, mandatory, exclusive, non transferable and irrevocable
> > rights
> > and obligations in many countries, notably those with a legal system
> based
> > on Civil Code, instead of Common Law.)
> >
> > So any licence should tolerate these mandatory legal attributions,
> because
> > not accepting them would make the licence completely invalid and not
> > enforceable in many countries (where the legality of publications in the
> > "public domain", without a protected signature, i.e. anonymously, is
> also
> > highly questionable, and the destruction of these identifiable
> signatures
> > is
> > illegal).
> >
> 
> 
>