Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: ECF/ESF

[lists]

On 10/5/2004, "Chris Croughton" <address@hidden> wrote:
>On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 11:27:52AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
>> It would also be really good if people could ask the Creative Commons
>> people to address the "comparable credit" and "anti-DRM" lawyerbombs
>> and the "author name purge" and "supertrademark" bugs present in all
>> their by-* licences. These issues have been dismissed by some CC
>> people and ignored by most, but no material under a CC 2.0 licence can
>> be free software. If you want more details, see Evan Prodromou's draft
>> summary at http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html (which has a
>> few bugs, but should give you the ideas) or ask me off-list.
>
>Well, it may not be 'free' according to the Debian definition, but isn't
>the same true of some of the FSF documentation licences?  At least some
>of what is on that web page seems to me (a non-lawyer) as silly
>nitpicking, in particular claiming that the anti-DRM clause means that
>it can't be distributed at all privately (if read that literally it
>would mean that playing a CC-licence CD through headphones would be not
>allowed, because it is "restricting access").
>
>It's that sort of nitpicking which puts a lot of people off the "free
>software" community.  "You say it gives me freedom, but then you won't
>let me use it with other free software", for instance (was it KDE which
>couldn't be included in Debian because two 'free' licences conflicted?).
>Or you get the software but not the documentation because that is
>distributed under a licence the FSF considers 'free' but debian-legal
>doesn't.

Well there are two issues here.

First, we all owe a huge debt to the Debian legal team, the FSF team, and
others like them for nitpicking. Small problems in licenses could be
exploited by nasty people to create large problems for the community. So
it's well worth getting every detail "right".

The DRM clause looks to me like a good example of a potentially massive
loophole, since it's quite possible that, for example, a major
distributor could, ten years down the line, prevent a raft of Free
Software from making use of their content because the software encrypts
data traffic. Of course they intended to make a stand against the kind
of bad DRM that we are all familiar with. But it needs to be done
correctly, otherwise it's simply nice words with no legal backbone.

The second issue, of course, is simply disagreeing over what is right and
wrong in a license. There you can simply say: I think Debian is wrong on
the GNU FDL, and I choose not to use Debian. There's no harm in Debian
taking their own stance on licenses though. And for Debian users (I'm
not one, by the way), they can be sure that no big suit could ever sue
them for license abuse. Likewise I'm unsure about Debian's points
regarding the attribution clause... they merit more thought, but
there's no harm in Debian saying they won't accept it, and you and I
deciding otherwise!

Of course internal disagreements might not look slick and professional to
the outside world, but then that's a matter for people like OSS Watch
and IBM to solve :-) There's little point in compromising on freedom
for the sake of being slightly more attractive in the short term.

Regards,
Tom