RE: Licences

Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> I am following your conversation, and I feel a bit sad that the
> final book may be non-free for the end-user (ie the buyer of the
> book). I find it is not a good incentive when you are not sure
> that the book will be 100% free-as-in-freedom.

I share this concern, but we want to balance it against what may be
necessary to get a printed book into as wide a distribution as possible,
including through commercial channels.

My sense is that 100% free-as-in-freedom - i.e. the publisher has no legal
protection against people making and selling knockoffs of the book - has a
strong chance of being a problem for a deal with a commercial publisher.

I think the only way to mitigate this for certain would be to find a
publisher in advance and settle the license issues with them, if possible.
However, we'd probably want to do that without actually signing any
publishing contract which commits us to deadlines, since we can't really
predict at this point how long the book will take to reach publishable form.
(Unless we think it's already close enough to allow such a prediction.)

> Also, a common practice when licensing programming books is to
> release the whole book under a free documentation license such
> as the FDL, and license again the source code itself under a
> free software license such as the LGPL. It would avoid the
> mentioned problem to apply a free documentation license to
> source code, making it non-free code.

That sounds like a good idea - I don't recall whether we discussed it
previously.  I've been a little concerned about the reverse problem with our
current choice, i.e. how well the LGPL really applies to non-program texts.

> Having an exclusive right is IMHO non-free and incompatible with
> the LGPL, ie you cannot prevent people from getting every individual
> LGPL-licensed material from the Wiki and making a book using them.

I think attempting to reserve a copyright on all possible compilations of
the material would violate any free license.  However, I think what we
probably want to do is reserve the copyright on a specific compilation.

Under U.S. copyright law at least (which is what mainly comes up in Google
;) a "compilation" is defined as a "collection and assembling of preexisting
materials or of data that are selected in such a way that the resulting work
as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship"[1].  In our case,
that would cover things like the table of contents, the chapter
organization, and anything else other than the actual contributed source
material.

If the source material has a free license, we couldn't legally forbid other
compilations (and we probably shouldn't want to ;)  U.S. Supreme Court
precedent says other compilations are OK "so long as the competing work does
not feature the same selection and arrangement"[2] of material.

So, I don't think that reserving the exclusive right to a specific
compilation is non-free, if other compilations are not prevented.  If that's
acceptable and agreed on, we could probably make the statement say that more
explicitly, or perhaps do that in a separate FAQ related to the copyright.
We should probably also place a different copyright notice on the table of
contents and chapter pages, etc.

Anton

[1] http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html
[2]
http://www.arentfox.com/quickGuide/businessLines/telemed/e-health_telemed/e-
healthNewsAlerts/cpyrtmeddata/cpyrtmeddata.html




-------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net email is sponsored by Shop4tech.com-Lowest price on Blank Media
100pk Sonic DVD-R 4x for only $29 -100pk Sonic DVD+R for only $33
Save 50% off Retail on Ink & Toner - Free Shipping and Free Gift.
http://www.shop4tech.com/z/Inkjet_Cartridges/9_108_r285